The other day, when I was taking the emus for a walk around and around and around the garden (a previous post describes this marathon!) one of them spied a bottle cap in the grass and promptly gulped it down before I could stop him.
Let me explain: usually our lawn is not strewn with bottle caps, however, having cleaned up after Son’s 18th birthday party, I had missed several of these, some of which had been thrown into bushes or potplants.
Anyway, I was alarmed as, one by one, all of the emus found and swallowed a bottle cap each as if they were on a treasure hunt. They kept hunting for more as if bottle caps were some sort of rare delicacy. I wrestled a couple of these sharp metal caps out of sharp beaks and then got down on my hands and knees and quickly picked up the remainder. When I did this, the Emerys all stood back and watched me as if they thought I was trying to be one of them. The cheekiest one kept trying to grab the caps out of my hand!
There is a lesson here: birds like shiny objects and are attracted to aluminium, plastic, glass, jewelry and anything reflective, so you have to be very careful. Since the bottle cap incident I have been terribly worried that one or all of the Emerys might get sick, but so far so good. I have been giving them plenty of cabbage to make sure! Hopefully the cabbage will provide the roughage required to eradicate the bottle caps (I will not go into detail here about my search for digested bottle caps!)
This has made me realize, too, how the littering around the countryside is probably killing some of the wild birds. We live on a very short road and yet, last week, Son and I collected a garbage bagful of cans, bottles and plastic bags (some empty, some full) that had been dumped here and there on the sides of this road. This probably happens in every country’s countryside – awful.
Other recent realizations:
- Weiros like cardboard. Buttons has now chewed through nearly a whole pizza box. Yeah, he wasn’t interested in the leftover pizza at all, only the boxes. He is getting fat! Don’t worry, we have now taken the rest of the pizza boxes to the local dump.
- Red-tailed black cockatoos like anything and everything chewable. Wantok particularly enjoyed power cords, furniture, Abs exercise machines and, before we set her free, human fingers and especially thumbs! I imagine that, by now, she will have eaten a good part of the forest in the hills! Any cockatoo who can eat a wooden chair in one sitting, can eat a tree or two easily! I don’t miss the furniture, which was old anyway, but I do miss Wantok!
I miss a lot of things….
jmgoyder 
………….it’s OK to miss things (we all miss the things that are the the bulding blocks of our lives).
…………and it’s OK to miss people (especially those we love who held those blocks together).
Beautiful – thank you!
I just wonder if an animal would eat something that could harm them. I take that back. People do that all the time. 🙂
True!