Help build a flight aviary for Opal

This is the story of Opal, a  juvenile Yellow-tailed Black-Cockatoo.  I'm a wildlife carer and have been nursing her back to health since June.

She was found on the ground, very weak and unable to feed herself.  Lucky for Opal a member of the public noticed her and alerted my local wildlife rescue group WIRES

I estimated Opal to be about 3 months old, just out of the nest hollow and very reliant on her parents for another 6 months.   The poor little thing could hardly lift her head,  sit on a perch and was incredibly skinny.   After treating her with fluids and feeding her over the weekend, I took Opal to see Dr Sandra Hodgins at Summer Hill Vet clinic for a full examination and she was put on a course of antibiotics.  I fed  her every three hours by a special syringe (crop needle) from sunrise to sunset.

After a month she had improved dramatically, had put on 90g and was perching better and more alert.  I was able to move her to my small aviary so she could practice climbing.  However we noticed that her climbing/walking wasn't great and X-rays revealed she had septic arthritus in her foot joints. This meant another month of anti-biotics and a trip to avian specialist Dr Jim Gill at Canley Heights Vet.


Three months on (& numerous vet visits) she is on the road to recovery, her X-rays are good but she still needs to get more agile on her feet and use her claws to hold things.  She also now needs to practice flying & landing. This means that she needs a bigger space to do this.  As I am still crop feeding her 3 x daily (she is not feeding herself enough to sustain her weight) she needs to stay with me as she is very used to this procedure and gets very stressed if anyone else does it to her!

She also needs to stay local as her flock have been to visit her (see below pics) and I would like to eventually return her to them.


My plan is to build her a flight aviary in my spacious backyard, but as a wildlife carer and conservation photographer I don't have the funds to do this, so would appreciate any donation to help fund this.  I would like to have it built in a month.

Original news story can be read here .
If you prefer to donate directly to Sydney Wires-Inner West,  you can do so here.

Thanks for taking the time to read Opal's story.
Angela X