Maximus Update

Maximus Magpie is growing by leaps and bounds. I upgraded him to a bigger cage and put him outside on Saturday, and since then he’s started preening and singing his heart out. Yesterday Phil came home from work to find that Maximus had two juvenile magpie friends flitting around the outside of his cage singing at him.  He’s still very feisty and has become quite the escape artist. Feeding/weighing time is a real adventure now and I end every day with at least one beak-induced injury. I’m hoping to release Maximus early next week as long as his health continues.

Meet Maximus

Maximus Magpie, that is.

This little guy is only a few weeks old and was rescued from the process plant thickener at work on Sunday morning. He was trying out his wings and somehow ended up crashing into the slurry.  As part of our environmental commitments on site, members of the Environment Department are trained and authorized by the New South Wales government as WIRES (Wildlife Information Rescue and Education Service) resucers/carers. As such I have a juvenile magpie in my care for at least two weeks.

Maximus is a feisty little bugger. Every morning and evening I pull him out of the cage, weigh him and feed him. He spends a lot of time snapping his beak and trying to bite me, but the less acclimatized he is to humans the better. We’re off to a pretty good start. He finally started to put on some weight and is beginning to look more like a magpie. He doesn’t make much noise except when I’m trying to extract him from his home. I can’t decide if his dusty grey colour is remnants of the slurry (despite the two baths he’s had) or just baby feathers. With any luck he’ll start preening soon and tidy himself up. Pekoe and Pixel don’t know what to make of him. Maximus was not impressed when Pekoe snuck into the spare room for a visit. I’ll post photos of the little guy’s growth over the next while!

A Saturday in Rural New South Wales

After last weekend’s camping adventures, Phil and I decided to take it easy this weekend. On Saturday we headed to a small community called Temora which has an excellent aviation museum and hosts flying days on a regular basis. We were treated to flights by some incredible historic planes including the Spitfire, Meteor, Vampire and Dragonfly. The pilots put on an excellent show.

Once the planes were grounded, we headed to an even smaller community (population 21) called Mirrool just down the road from Temora. Our friend Jo had found out about an event that was taking place there that we had to see for ourselves. The annual Silo Kick. Every year a group of people line up to attempt to kick a rugby ball over the silos. We watched the finals which ended in a draw. When the kicking was done, the hosts proceeded to auction off Shingleback Lizards (otherwise known as Bog Eye’s) for hundreds of dollars and race them. I’ve said it before but it never ceases to amaze me – Australians will race anything!

And now, a couple videos for your viewing pleasure: