The saga of Jean-Luc Patachou

"We are responsable for the beings that we seduce."
(Nous sommes responsables pour les êtres que nous séduisons)
Marguerite Yourcenar
(this is the kind of sentence that hits you the first time you read it, and stays in your memory, becomes part of who you are. Notice she didn´t say "human beings", she talks of beings in general, and that includes people and cats and dogs and birds...)

Jean-Luc Patachou is a bird of the species Serinus serinus, that I found on the road, on June the 27th. He had fallen from the nest when he could not yet fly, maybe pushed by his brothers, or may he just felt, in his little restless soul, an urge to go and explore the vast world. Anyway, he was in a dangerous situation, because that was a busy road, with lots of cars passing by, not to mention children, cats and dogs. Thousends of little birds die every year, and I also know the recomended procedure, when you find a bird that has fallen from the nest, is to put him back on a safe branch of a tree or shrub near by, so that his parents can keep feeding him. But in the case of Jean-Luc, the trees near by were tall, I couln´t see any nest from the ground, he was restless and wouldn´t stay on a branch, and the place was not a quiet place at all. So I decided to bring him home and feed him, and release him in the wild when he could fly and feed himself.

I fed him a protein rich mash that I made twive every day, cruching rice, wheat, yolk and albumine from boiled eggs, bits of raw salmon, grasshoppers and other insectcs, letuce, figs, etc. in a mortar, then feeding him with a seringe. Notice his full belly after a meal:


It´s always good to have a shoulder where you can lean on.




Cleaning his feathers on the computer.




For two weeks I couldn´t leave home and I had to get out of bed at around seven to start feeding Jean-Luc. It´s a lot of trouble raising a son.


I tought him how to eat seeds



Here´s Jean-Luc eating alfresco,two weeks after the rescue:



And here´s a sparrow next to Jean-Luc:


Now I hope Jean-Luc will find some of his species to live a happy life.