Marvelous Mike!

I heard him saying that on our local radio this morning. 🙂 Really cute.

They said he was hand reared which reminded me of a sparrow that mum hand reared. It had barely got any feathers when she rescued it and she used to feed it with tweezers, through the night too initially. We went to Cornwall for our summer holiday and Clarence (the sparrow) came with us as mum couldn't leave him for a fortnight as he was still too small. Luckily we stayed with friends and, as they knew what mum was like, they didn't blink an eye when she walked in, bird cage in hand.

He was totally adorable and used to run around on the floor before he started launching himself off mum's lap or the back of the sofa in his first attempts at flight.

We had him until he was fully fledged and mum decided that it was time to release him back to the wild. That in itself was heart wrenching because we left his cage hanging in a tree and he kept flying back to the house and sitting on the windowsill looking through the glass at us. 😞 He eventually realised that he couldn't live with us any more and after a week he left his cage and flew off. However, the following spring mum looked out of the window and he was sitting on our bird table with a little friend. We knew it was him because he had distinctive markings on one of his wings.

(Sorry for hijacking the thread.)