Animal Diaries Archive

Feeding Our Birds Up

3 June 2005

As we mentioned last week, it is cooling down, with the official first day of winter falling in this week. Now you may think that this does not have too much effect on the birds, but it does. Like all animals they need to keep themselves warm and although their feathers help to insulate them, they still need to be able to produce their own body heat, which takes up extra energy and means that they need to eat more food. So each day after they have done their work, we need to adjust their feed amount in accordance with the daily forecast of the weather. These weights are vitally important to us to make certain that the birds are all going to be happy to perform. As we are training each bird we set them a target body weight. Each bird gets on the scales every morning so we can see how fat they are, and this figure then in turn gives us an idea on what amount of food that bird needs get to make sure they are not putting on too much weight.

All of our feathered friends are going well. Amelio the Wedge-tailed Eagle is just coming through his moult and is still losing several feathers each day. Boy, when he is finished he his going to look like a handsome fellow. Djagarna the jabiru is also continuing to change colour with the fluffy down feathers on the neck being replaced with iridescent blues, purples and greens of the adult jabiru plumage. Ok, that's it for now so until next week, goodbye.