Buna's Big Adventure

This morning Buna, our baby cockatiel, experienced a few fleeting moments of freedom. While Tomoe and I were in the field behind our house, we heard a familiar scream and looked up to see a white streak across the sky. Buna - Awii and Klees' baby hatched in November. We dropped everything and scrambled up the river bank in the direction we had seen her fly. After a few frantic moments, Tomoe spotted her petrified on the neighbor's roof and we watched and waited, wondering where she would fly to next. Little did we know, we were not the only ones watching and waiting.

Buna seemed terrified, and did not move for several minutes, so I ran home to fetch Awii (her father) in a cage, hoping that Awii's calls would lure Buna from the roof to a place where we could grab her. After about 30 minutes with no reaction, I took Awii home and put his age in the upstairs window hoping that being bit higher might make it easier to Buna to come to him. Still no movement.

Our options now were to hope that 1) Buna somehow decides to go to her father. 2) I can climb up on the roof without scaring her away, or 3) She dehydrates and passes out making it weasy to catch her. We didn't feel like waiting for her to dehydrate, so I climbed up on the roof and got quite close when Buna took off. In the house she has never been a skillful flier, but out here she was brilliant.

The moment she took off I scrambled to the ladder while Tomoe watched to see where she flew to. Before I even made it off the roof, however, I heard Tomoe's panicked screams about a crow. By the time I made it down, the only thing I saw was a large black bird speeding into the mountains with a small white puff of feathers in its beak. I chased it along the river, but when I saw it fly across the valley to the other mountain, I ran home to hop on the motor scooter, hoping that I could at least follow it wherever it flew, and *maybe* have chance at hitting the crow with a rock or something that would cause it to drop Buna.

By the time I arrived at the area where the crow was last spotted with Buna in its beak, I had pretty much given up hope.

Just a few days ago we threw away a brood of Klee's newer eggs because we didn't want more babies. Today we put a nekozukura in their cage. This is a traditional craft of the village, a rice-straw cat house (before child welfare laws, it is said to have been babies were kept while mothers worked in the field). Awii and Klee have been checking it out as a possible nest ever since we recovered it from an old house. Now we hope they will make use of it.

We plan to go to the mountain tomorrow to look for any traces of Buna.

I have very few photos of Buna. Although I took one of her on the roof today (just in case) the best ones are from the months after she hatched. She is also the white bird in the background of the first photo in this post.