One morning a few years ago i was driving to the snow with a friend. It was early morning, before sunrise, when i saw something colourful on the side of the road... My friend didn't see it but i decided to go back and found this beautiful baby Crimson Rosella...
As i approached the bird it didn't even move. She lay in the gutter all twisted and mangled... I thought she was dead...
But then i noticed her eye moving and blinking... She was alive... I tried to pick her up and to my surprise she allowed it...
This is very unusual cos wild birds won't even allow humans to get close... Her body was lifeless so i folding her wings up properly...
I tried to place her on my finger but her feet were partially closed and wouldn't hold onto my finger...
She hadn't been in the gutter for long... I could tell cos she was so clean... I think she may have been run over by a car that was just up ahead.
I decided to put her in a shoe box and she sat there with her tailed fanned out. I still don't know why she sat in this unnatural position.
If you look closely at her foot you can see that its folded over in a peculiar position... We got to the snow and she was still the same so we went out riding... She was the same at lunch and at the end of the day so we took her back to the hotel...
Over the following days we saw gradually improve. We would go riding in the day and leave her at the hotel with plenty of food and water...
By the last day she was getting around and had become used to my mate and i... She would climb up our arms, fly around the room, nibble on everything and break whatever she could... All natural behaviours... I was tossing up weather or not to take her home and keep her. She was tame now, but i decided to release her at the same spot i found her during our drive back home...
When we got there she wouldn't go. I tried to toss her into the direction of the trees but she would just turn back to us...
My mate said "She wants to stay with u" but I was unconvinced... Most birds have extraordinary vision in the day but under low light their vision becomes even worse than ours... I don't think she could see well enough in the dark to be able to fly away...
So i went to a tree, placed her on a branch and walked back to the car... I thought she might fly back to me but she stayed in the tree...
She would be an adult now... All of her juvenile feathers would of been replaced by the adult colour that we see in the picture above...
No more green, just black, blue and crimson... I wonder if she would remember me if she saw me again...
