I’ve written about a lot of animal rescues on here, but this has to be the most amazing one that I’ve seen. A woman was walking around outside and found a broken starling egg shell. Perhaps a predator had grabbed it and emptied it. No… there was a baby bird in there, so tiny and fragile and featherless. His eyes hadn’t even opened. She couldn’t leave him there to die, so she was in a race against time to rehabilitate him.
Hickman put the bird that she eventually dubbed Klinger into a makeshift incubator. She did research online and experts there cautioned that the bird wouldn’t make it. Still, she was determined to try and several times a day, she jammed a feeding syringe into his mouth. The food was part cat food, part hardboiled eggs, part applesauce and there were avian vitamins. It doesn’t sound too appetizing, but Klinger loved it.
As time went by, Klinger got fuzzier and eventually opened his eyes. He kept eating the food that Hickman offered – it was funny, his mouth seemed like a yellow Venus flytrap when he would tilt his head up and open wide. After a while, he learned to feed himself and was growing into a full-sized bird. He also began to take his own baths in a bowl and learned to play with a ball. This avian even learned to speak!
The whole plan was for Hickman to release Klinger once he was healthy. She explained that he had imprinted on her and wouldn’t be able to survive in the wild, since she wasn’t able to teach him skills that his real mommy would have done. Fortunately, it’s not illegal to own starlings in the state that she lives in. Here’s hoping that she and Klinger spend many more good years together. They both deserve that.
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