Bonnie was feeling off-colour but now she’s sitting pretty

MEET Bonnie the rainbow lorikeet. She wasn’t always this pretty.

Bonnie the rainbow lorikeet about five weeks into her recovery. Picture: Angela Robertson-Buchanan

MEET Bonnie the rainbow lorikeet. She wasn’t always this pretty.

At 10 days old, when she fell out of the nest in Redfern, inner Sydney — or perhaps was ejected by her parents as an unwanted runt — she was a scrawny, bald, grey-skinned thing, clinging to life. A kindly passer-by picked her up and took her to Angela Robertson-Buchanan, a photographer and wildlife rescuer who specialises in birds. Angela nursed Bonnie to health and maturity — and documented her development in minute detail, which was a wondrous thing. “In the wild you only see the young when they emerge from their nest in a high tree hollow at 10 weeks,” Angela says. “But day by day, before my eyes, Bonnie was transforming into a beautiful parrot.” This photo, which features in Sydney’s Head On photo festival, was taken when Bonnie was five weeks old, just as she began to bloom.

It’s a tough job nursing chicks, says Angela, who’s raised 50 in the past couple of years. They are “very needy, very clingy”, and require feeding — 5ml of gloop, served at 30ºC — every four hours. That sounds strangely familiar. “Yes, it’s very much like a newborn baby,” laughs the 39-year-old. Bonnie would come to her for cuddles, too, and Angela obliged in the early days — “it made her feel loved and secure, just as a parent bird’s grooming would do” — but at 10 weeks the time had come to “wild her up”, she says. “She needed to be talking to her own kind.”

So Bonnie went into an aviary in the back yard in Ashfield (the “bird ghetto”, long-suffering husband Scott calls it) where she could interact with the wild rainbow lorikeets that came to feed on nectar in the garden. And at 12 weeks, Angela did a “soft release”, leaving the aviary door open. Bonnie returned a couple of times to the sanctuary of the aviary, and Angela’s presence. And then, she was gone. It was a bittersweet moment, Angela says. She wonders sometimes if Bonnie is among the rowdy mobs of rainbow lorikeets that visit her garden. She’ll never know, though. The buggers all look alike.