Winter Bird Feeding Tips

Song trush

The winter can be a tough time of year for your garden birds. However, you can easily give your feathered friends a helping hand. Attracting birds to your garden will be more successful, if they have a place that makes them feel secure and comfortable even in the worst weather. Please check out the link below for some winter bird feeding tips and other useful information about how to help your garden birds.

Long-tailed tits

Winter Bird Feeding Tips

Corvid Isle FAQ

Jackdaw nestling

We have been advised to take our Corvid Isle Forum offline due to a severe security vulnerability. Subsequently, we have analysed and monitored the situation for a couple of weeks. Unfortunately, at the time being there is no timeline available about how and when this security issue is going to be sufficiently patched. Therefore we have taken the decision to retire the Corvid Isle Forum for good. However, as the Forum contained a wealth of useful information, internal and external links as well as plenty of advice, we have transferred and converted all this material into a new ‘frequently asked questions’ style of database. We do hope that our users will find this newly created source of information well structured and easily accessible. Please follow the link below to check out the new Corvid Isle FAQ section.

Carrion crow Emma

Corvid Isle FAQ

Expert tips on helping birds during the winter by ‘Happy Beaks’ – Guest Blog

Robin

We would like to thank the team from Happy Beaks for including Corvid Isle in this very useful and informative blog post providing much needed information about how to support our garden birds during winter. We hope that you enjoy this blog post and find the information provided useful.

More information can be found by following the links below:

Winter Bird Feeding Tips

Feeding Wild Birds In The Winter

Rook Isla

Rook Isla

Isla joined us recently at nestling age after being rescued by well-meaning but inexperienced people. We do not know a lot about Isla’s story other than that she has been found as a presumed orphan. We understand that the carer struggled increasingly to raise Isla. After about two weeks they gave up and brought Isla eventually to a local bird rescue, who recognised immediately that Isla was in great trouble. Subsequently, we have been asked to take over Isla’s longterm care and rehabilitation, which we did.

Juvenile Rook Isla
Rook Isla after her first bath

Coexistence of Multiple Health Conditions

After a thorough assessment we found that Isla showed signs of a septicaemia with undulating temperatures. She also demonstrated extensive soft tissue swellings involving hock, ankle and foot joints. Interestingly, Isla’s wing joints were completely preserved. Both very swollen hock joints showed already several small pressure sores. Additionally, obscured by the marked joint swelling, we also noticed an unusual deformity of Isla’s right-sided hock joint and foot, which rather looked like a traumatic injury than a congenital deformity or simple involvement by the coexisting inflammatory joint disease. It was difficult to ascertain the exact pathology due to the severity of joint and soft tissue swelling. However, careful physical examination showed a lack of sensation and power in the injured foot, which made it likely that a trauma has caused at least part of the hock joint swelling, having also lead to a nerve injury. Also, it seemed very likely that Isla has suffered a spinal contusion, as she showed a slight weakness in both legs, whilst both hip joints remained unaffected by joint infection and lack of power. Not unexpected in Isla’s case, as her immune system was clearly overwhelmed, we found her suffering of an external and internal parasite infestation.

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Wild Animal Suffering (Republished)

Editor’s note: This post has originally been posted on 9th April 2018, and has now been updated and republished.

Many people have a naive and rosy view of the kind of lives animals are living in the wild. Some people strongly believe, and this includes sometimes wildlife rescuers and rehabbers, conservationists and people who think of themselves as nature or animal lovers, that non-human animals living in the wild live in some kind of paradise. However, nothing could be further from the truth. Animals living in the wild live lives that are far from idyllic, and most of them have to deal with the reality of constant threat of tremendous suffering. Although many people accept the fact that animals experience suffering, the willingness to help, to minimise or eliminate suffering, remains rather an exceptional act of kindness. Also, for reasons remaining mostly unclear, many people assume that wild animals do cope better with suffering than domestic animals or our beloved pets. However, there is no reason or scientific foundation for this assumption. 1

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