Slightly off topic from the regular fare of this blog but I think its a story worth writing about. This happened a couple days back and I'm posting about it only now. Last week our neighbor knocked on our house and told us that she found a baby heron scampering about on her way home. She didn't know what to do with it and didn't want to leave it where she found it because the local cats would most likely feast on it.
We discussed amongst ourselves and we decided that the best course of action would be to take it to a zoo. Our other options were to put it back on the tree but the problem with that was that we didn't know where its nest was and if we did find it we weren't sure if the mother would take care of it. From my experience with hamsters before, some animals won't take care of their young anymore once they smell something foreign on their offspring. The other option we contemplated on was to take care of it. But that would be difficult with work and having to take care of the kids. Plus of course we weren't even sure how or what to feed it. Then there was the fact that some animals regurgitate their food to feed their young and not one of us was ever about to do that *snicker8
We had an hour before the zoo closed so we had to high tail it to the zoo. Luckily when we got there the zoo people were already well versed with people sending animals over to them to adopt that we didn't have to spend much time explaining our intentions.
The veterinarian who inspected the bird told us that it was a certain variety of heron. The name however already escaped me. And from the looks of the bird, it looks like it was newly hatched and fell off the tree.
The picture above is of a Yellow Bittern posted on Wikipedia. That's not the type of Heron we rescued, I just posted it as a placeholder for an image of a heron. All I know about the heron my neighbor saved was that it was small and colored brown.
Aside from having that problem off our chest, another good thing my neighbor got out of it was unlimited passes to the zoo till the month end of July. One reason I'm posting about this today is because our neighbor informed us that she and her family just spent a wonderful saturday at the zoo.
The key learning on this is for my son, that doing good has its rewards and the responsibility of taking care of animals as stewards appointed by God. For his reward he too also got to spend some time in the zoo.
