Ron's blog

Saturday morning I was at the front gate chatting to Vicky Magpie when the noisy miners let out an almighty screech. Looking up, I saw a huge wedgetailed eagle wheeling overhead. Vicky went very still, and watched the eagle intently. But then the eagle started to glide away out over the valley, away from our magpies' territory. Then I saw why!

Our butcherbird group (Butch and Cas are still AWOL) now consists of Dimpy, 3y.o., and Kerry (2y.o.) and two new birds. One seems to be from the intruder group who has changed groups, and we are calling him Terry, and one other who knows us so well we think it must be someone we knew years ago. Dimpy's older brothers, Teddy and Tommy, and his still-older brothers, Eddy and Freddy, are out there somewhere, and maybe this is one of them. The trouble is it's extremely hard to tell butcherbirds apart. Magpies are hard enough, but butcherbirds look almost identical to human eyes.

Poor Sophie magpie has still not let us catch her to take her to the vet for her flu and eye trouble. When I got the cage out, she knew it was for her and squarked and flew up into the tree. Dimpy butcherbird, and Mindy and Monty magpies tried out the cage, seemingly knowing that it wasn't there for them. I did get a bit of a feeling today that Sophie looked a little bit better, so I am keeping my fingers crossed.

While we were worrying about getting Butch to recover, Sophie Magpie started getting the sniffles. Unfortunately it seems to have developed into some kind of all-out flu, and she is also getting eye trouble too.

For a few days now Sophie magpie has looked unwell. I thought it would get better, but she now looks as if her eyes are in trouble also. And she seems to have a runny nose or something, which Butch never did, so it seems to be something other than what hit Butch. She ate some medicine this morning, so we'll keep on feeding her to help her out. If we get a chance, we might have to try to catch her for a trip to the vet. It will be harder though because she isn't coming down from the trees much, unfortunately.