Speaking as an occasional wildlife rescuer - it’s not uncommon. Birds are really fragile. They’ve got high metabolisms and very little body mass so their reserves are tiny and they can’t recover from injury or illness like a bigger animal could. They go into shock incredibly quickly and rarely recover. And their bones are so delicate that unless you’re really lucky, even surgery can’t fix fractures. Wing bones in particular - we had to put down a wedge-tailed eagle with a broken wing just this week. Not fixable.
It’s always worth trying, but the success rate is low.
The pupper knocked off the real dumb ones who nested in shrubs (… no, really).
But there’s still a solid population.
A few too many. Hence acquisition of one of these powerful owl type possum removalists.
As a kid we found an injured bird (can’t recall what it was, maybe a budgie or the like) in the backyard. Convinced dad to build it a cage, so he spent all day building a decent sized cage for it out of bits of wood and wire. End of the day we put it in and within an hour it was dead.
ha. Not this time. But on my first trip to my relatives place in Italy I was met with my aunt plucking a freshly killed pigeon for our dinner. Didn’t quite do it for me
We called that Art Dago when we drove through Templestowe one day…and the guy who owned Everest Ice Cream lived down the road from me in Carnegie…fully equipped fence with concrete lions and a concrete lawn for him to hose every weekend.
A few years ago, I found a fallen baby bird - fell out of a nest. I placed it back in the nest, but it’s parents abandoned it. I decided rather than let it starve, I’d feed it.
It was old enough to eat crunched-up crickets (I had a bearded dragon at the time) and some other stuff I tried. I did this for a few weeks - it fell out of the nest again twice and I ended up putting the nest in a semi-lidded box. Anyway, I became quite obsessed with this little thing as I’m want to do.
The bird was starting to flap its wings, and hopping around a lot, so being a bird expert, I decided it was time to teach it to fly. I did this by first holding it cupped in my hands while running around the back yard. A few days later, I started to loosen my grip a little, and incorporate up and down movements while running, to give it the feeling of ‘lift’.
We eventually got to the stage of me holding its legs and giving it little ‘scares’ while standing on the top rung of a ladder in the yard. My then wife came out once, shook her head, and walked back in. All this tuition took about a week.
On the final day, the little thing jumped out of my hand and made it to a weeping mulberry in the garden. I retrieved it, and we repeated this with the bird getting more and more confidence and making greater distances. Finally - the little one took off, circled around the house, and disappeared. I never saw it again.