I was well into our garden butterfly survey (more on this in a later post) when I was interrupted again by another live contribution from next-door. Not content with his donation of a perfectly good young hedgehog ("it was curled up in a ball and I thought it was dead, so I brought it to you to see if you could look after it"), he's now given me this poor critter:
It seems to be intact with no broken bones as far as we can tell, but it's weak, flightless and has no parents around. We'll do what we can for it, but I suspect that we'll have to let nature take charge soon.
THE SMALL(ish) PRINT... (updated 23/07/2016)
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Nature can be harsh yet trying is the right thing for the poor thing. No broken bones is promising. Bit of warmth, bit of food and you never know.
Aww. Fingers crossed for it. Well done for trying, whatever the outcome.
You old softie.
Hmm, you might want to tell your neighbour to leave the animals where he found them - the parents of the bird for example usually will continue to feed the bird if they find it close by the nest.
Anyhow, good luck with "fixing" this little fellow!
BTW = MrsH tells me it was a cuckoo - did it survive?
Not sure about the cuckoo thing, John - we are fairly confident that it was a swift or similar such bird, as it had long arced-backwards wings, a forked tail and very short legs. We looked up some info about hand-rearing swifts on t'internet and fed it some suitable stuff, then placed it in a warm, safe, sheltered spot high in the hedge where there were plenty of insects and grubs. We placed it high to help it to get launched (they can't take off from the ground, allegedly, and that's why the parents don't land to help out). A while later it had perked up a lot, so we left it alone for a while longer. When we eventually went back it had gone, we searched everywhere within crawling/falling/gliding range and it wasn't to be found, so we're confident that it flew rather than fell.