Animal Rescue – by Bastian Fox Phelan
ISLAND | ONLINE ONLY | AUSTRALIAN NATURE WRITING
My first experience of rescuing a native animal doesn’t end well. It’s after midnight and I’m driving home to Newcastle from Sydney. At the big roundabout in Jesmond, there’s a flash of pale-coloured feathers in my headlights. I swerve. Did I hit it? We pull over. When my partner spots the bird, it’s mounting the gutter on the far side of the highway. I can see its pink and grey plumage under the streetlights. It’s a galah, seemingly unfazed by its brush with death, strutting in the confident, plucky way that parrots do – perhaps just out for a midnight stroll? But that doesn’t seem right. Galahs aren’t nocturnal, and if they can still fly, they shouldn’t be walking across roads.
Something about its wing looks funny – the way its tapered tip sags like a door that’s come off its hinges. Carlin investigates while I bark instructions across the quiet highway: ‘Catch it like a chicken!’. I’m convinced this technique will work, but a few minutes later I hear Carlin cry out in pain. I go to help. His finger is bleeding. The galah is livid. It glares up at me from the pavement. I take a step closer; it stretches out its wings and hisses. I didn’t expect this display of ferocity from a bird, especially not one that is mortally wounded; one wing hangs from its body by a bloody thread. I wince at its injuries. Did I cause them? I hadn’t felt the soft thud of its body against the car. Either way, I now feel responsible.
I’ve come armed with a green shopping bag and a plan – I will employ my human cunning, since the injured bird is apparently fearless. Perhaps I would be too if I had a beak strong enough to crack open seed pods. The galah waddles towards the rose garden of Jesmond Park. In the distance, there’s a line of tall eucalyptus trees, and behind them, a dark place undisturbed by urban light. I will later learn that it’s Jesmond Bushland, a piece of remnant Lower Hunter spotted gum-ironbark forest. The galah is heading that way, but a journey on foot is impossible. Between the road and the park is an open concrete drain – a section of Dark Creek that has been fixed in place. I don’t want the injured bird to end up in the drain like a piece of rubbish. I follow a few paces behind. It gives me a contemptuous look and continues its slow escape.
It’s hard not to love galahs, with their loud personalities and camp colouration. If I were to make a ‘steal her look’ meme for a galah, it would be a light grey suit jacket, a rose-pink undershirt, a pale pink crown, and a nutcracker. Some people keep galahs as companion parrots. They bond well with humans and can even be taught to mimic our speech. In captivity they can live into their seventies; in the wild, it’s more like twenty years, due to hazards like roads and vehicles. But nobody is concerned about the welfare of galahs – they’re abundant and widespread, one of those native species that seem to have benefitted from the vast changes that occurred with colonisation. In some places, they’re listed as ‘unprotected fauna’; farmers are allowed to shoot them because they damage crops. In the 1930s, galahs were often found in stew pots, a common ingredient in bush cuisine. From this era, too, we have the Australian vernacular, ‘bloody galah’ – a stupid person, a fool. But the galah doesn’t seem like a foolish bird to me. Like all cockatoos, they’re alert, sharply perceptive. You can sense that someone is there, peering at you from small, dark eyes – curious. Or, in the case of the bird I’m following, furious.
I’m now within arm’s reach. I open the green bag, hold my breath, and bring it down over the bird. There’s a brief pause before the riot begins. Instead of a galah, I’ve bagged a small demon.
“Instead of a galah, I’ve bagged a small demon.”
With much indignant squawking, the bird punches the bag, over and over, demanding its release. I hold the straps against the concrete while Carlin fetches a picnic blanket. When we’ve wrapped the bag, we drive to the animal emergency hospital. The galah is silent. I wonder if it’s afraid, relieved, or simply waiting to see what will happen. But I can’t sense animal emotions, and if I could, how would I soothe them?
At the hospital, we hand over the bird. The wing looks bad, even to my untrained eye, but I hope that something can be done. In the waiting room, I look at the white plastic chairs and muted grey walls. I wonder if there’s another galah perched on a tree branch somewhere in the dark interior of Jesmond Park, waiting for its mate to return.
The vet comes out to deliver the prognosis.
‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘It had to go to God.’
I feel deflated. It had been a feat to rescue the galah. We’d only been at the animal hospital for five minutes, and already it was over.
In the weeks afterwards, I think of the galah often, particularly when I’m driving and cockatoos dip over the road. I wonder about our intervention. Had it helped? Would the galah have chosen that quick death under bright lights, in the hands of humans, or would it have been better to let it wander into the night? It seems appropriate for a human to have ended its suffering, given we were the ones responsible.
There had been other rescued birds. A fig bird fledgling that fell out of its nest. Another baby bird in a carpark that I picked up, only to have a hundred tiny mites scurry up my arms. When I was ten years old, just after my family had moved to Wollongong, there was a week of storms and high seas. When the wind and swell settled down, we went for a walk at the beach near the lighthouse. All down the long, lonely strip of sand, bodies were scattered like large stones. Some were still moving. They were short-tailed shearwaters, or muttonbirds, and they had flown 15,000 kilometres from Alaska. At the end of their migration, many perished from pure exhaustion. I begged my parents to take home just one bird. If it survived, maybe this mass death would not be so meaningless. My parents obliged, and we placed the chosen bird in a carboard box under the kitchen sink. In the morning, the floor of the box was covered in excrement and the bird was dead.
‘At least we tried,’ my mother said.
In spring, I’m still thinking about the galah. Why did this bird seem special to me? Perhaps because I had never rescued such an intelligent animal. Birds like galahs and magpies understand object permanence. They play and use language to ‘babble’ – much like a human baby. Some birds even have facial expressions, like dogs. They display emotions, and even have tantrums. What impressed me about the galah on the road that night was its rage. It did not go gently; it resisted being ‘saved’ – but I had saved it anyway, and didn’t that mean I was a special kind of person, one who puts themselves at risk on highways at night, for the good of the animals? I decide that buried in this experience is a message – a calling – and I sign up to the local wildlife rescue service.
This is just before the summer of 2019, when the world is about to be remade. First, in Australia, it’s the fires. They are somewhere far from me, but then, as the fires grow on a scale previously unimaginable, the smoke comes to blanket even my coastal city. I am afraid of the particles in the air and order special masks online. I spend the summer indoors, doomscrolling and feeling powerless; millions of animals are being incinerated. I see footage of someone rescuing a burnt koala and remember that my application to join the wildlife rescue still hasn’t been processed. I nudge them by email, but they’re slow to respond. They must be busy – there are many animals in need of care.
By the time the fires die down, a new catastrophe is unfolding. The virus has arrived, and we’re instructed to stay home. Food and essential items disappear from shelves. It seems ridiculous that people are panic buying, but panic is contagious. We buy a 10 kg bag of rice and stock up on canned beans. Some people are sure this will all be over in few weeks; I think I’m being more realistic when I guess at six months.
Along with everything else, the training for new wildlife rescue members is put on hold. But in June of 2020, as people emerge from hibernation, Carlin and I are trained and provided with a pink plastic crate for transporting injured wildlife. As card-carrying members, we’re allowed to rescue and transport native animals. Our earlier experiences, then, must have been somewhat illicit. I keep the crate in my boot, but it takes me a while to find a place in the organisation. It happens one night, when the frazzled hotline phone manager asks if I can take on a shift. For the rest of the year and into the next one, every Tuesday night, my phone buzzes with calls about injured native animals. During periods of lockdown, this is my only connection to the community.
I begin to learn more about animal rescue, but at one remove. I am a conduit between the knowledgeable animal carers and the clueless public on the roads and in backyards at night. I become confident advising people on the best way to keep an injured bird comfortable, or how to transport a possum. Most of my knowledge is theoretical. The one time I’m able to draw on my own experience is when someone calls about a cockatoo. ‘Watch out for the beak,’ I say. ‘They hurt.’
Many of the calls are about birds. One time, it’s ducks down a drain. A nest of tawny frogmouths fallen into a wheelie bin. Plovers nesting on a hockey field. For most calls, I have a standard list of questions: ‘Can you send me a photo?’ (code for ‘Can I confirm that this is a native animal’, and not a feral pigeon or rat). ‘Is the animal contained?’ is another frequent question. Most callers express concern about the animal’s welfare but want us to come and catch them. I have to explain that if they can’t catch a bird with a broken leg perched on the roof of their garage, it will be unlikely our rescuers can, especially as many of the experienced volunteers are of retirement age.
In spring, the bird calls triple. With baby birds, I can practically read off a script, and I often wish I had a flow chart I could distribute. Does the baby bird have feathers? Yes – put it in a bush or on a tree branch, it’s learning to fly. No – return it to the nest or create a substitute nest from an ice cream container with holes in the bottom and some twigs inside. Do not remove the baby bird from its habitat unless it is sick, injured, or otherwise in danger – a baby bird’s best chance for survival is to stay with its parents. I receive countless calls about birds that people identify as everything from kookaburras to hawks, which turn out to be feral spotted dove chicks. A carer tells me that it’s an exceedingly stupid bird whose nest is a few sticks placed loosely together; their chicks often fall to the ground. I wonder if their stupidity or their feral status makes them less deserving of care.
Winter is much quieter – either because the animals, or the human animals, are keeping close to home. Occasionally I have to console a driver standing by a darkened highway, dragging a fresh kangaroo carcass off the road. But every night there’s at least one call about a bird. After a year on the phones, I begin to suspect that some members care more about certain animals – those that are cuter, like ring-tailed possums, or those that require specialised knowledge, like bats – and less about other, common animals. Many suburban birds fall into this category. This speciesism starts to affect me as well, and as I triage the calls, I wonder if anyone will care enough to leave their home and meet someone with a noisy miner in a shoebox, or if I should ask the caller to take it to the nearest vet in the morning. There are only a few people who I know will take birds any time; one has a kind voice and calls me darlin’.
I wonder if people care less about birds because most of the time, if their wings are busted up enough for them to get caught, they probably won’t fly again. We don’t tell the public this, because we want people to keep caring, keep reporting injured wildlife. Sometimes people care too much. A caller who goes out of their way to deliver a sick rainbow lorikeet to one of our members phones several times during the week to ask what happened to the bird. I usually don’t speak with carers after they receive the animals. Sometimes I think it’s better not to know. Eventually, I follow up.
‘Oh,’ she says. ‘It died a few hours after it arrived.’
When I call the person back, I sense real grief in their tone, but they thank me for letting them know.
“What motivates people to care about animals? Is it because they, too, have suffered, or been powerless, or wanted someone to save them? At least half of my interactions with people on the hotline – both the public and our members – have a subtext.”
What motivates people to care about animals? Is it because they, too, have suffered, or been powerless, or wanted someone to save them? At least half of my interactions with people on the hotline – both the public and our members – have a subtext. Some people like to see themselves as heroes, fighting for those without a voice. Some people care so much about the animals, they forget to care about the humans. Many are simply more sympathetic to the suffering of animals. All can’t help but get involved; we don’t get calls from people who believe that nature should take its course – though what is natural about building roads through habitats, or the teeth and claws of introduced species, or cars?
Through my work on the hotline, I’ve learned that the road where I met the galah is going to be extended – right through Jesmond Bushland. The Inner City Bypass will save people time on their commute and provide better access to John Hunter Hospital, but it will cut the habitat in two. I wonder where the birds will roost when the mature trees have been cleared, how the echidnas will cross the four-lane highway at night. Will I be the one to answer those calls? Some nights I wonder if the wildlife rescue organisation makes a difference, or if we’re just picking up the pieces from all those inevitable collisions. 10 million native animals are killed by cars in Australia every year, and we continue building roads.
One evening, as I’m about to finish my shift, a man phones up, distraught. A tawny frogmouth had bounced off his windshield on his way to the mines in Singleton. Nobody will be awake to take this bird, and he’s in the middle of nowhere. The only place he can go is the animal emergency hospital, all the way back in Broadmeadow. He turns his ute around and heads in. By the time he completes this journey, he will have been driving for over two hours, and he’ll be late to work – and the bird will probably die anyway. For some reason, I am touched by this caller’s actions. Perhaps because it smashes my stereotypes about men who work in mines. Perhaps because I know what it’s like to feel responsible, late at night, with nobody around. I know what it’s like to make a connection. I send a few text messages.
When I finish my shift, the hotline is diverted, and the phone manager sends me a text telling me to keep warm and have a good sleep, as she always does. It’s hard to stay awake on these long winter nights, and I’m grateful to be climbing into bed. But then my phone lights up. Someone in Kurri Kurri can take the tawny. I call the guy, and he drops it at her house. The next day, he texts me to ask how the bird is going, and I call to find out.
‘It’s a bit dazed from the bump on the head,’ the carer says. ‘But I’ll be able to release it in a few nights.’ I think about how it would feel to stand in the bush, under the stars, opening a cage and watching as a tawny’s soft feathers carry it silently into the canopy.
I let the guy know that it’s alright, and he’s happy. He won’t stop driving his car, of course, or working in the coal mines, in service of an industry that threatens all life on earth. But it still means something that he cared about this bird, enough to get involved, to do something. With care comes connection, and if there’s connection between humans and animals, perhaps there’s still hope. ▼
Image: Alex Eckermann
This work is part of our Australian Nature Writing Project suite.
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