My Kaja Robert.

Nowdays it´s forbidden to have any wild swedish animals as pets (exept for badgers. Hunters need tame badgers when they train their burrovers for hunting). In most ways I agree with that law but it has a disadvantage. If You find a hurt animal You can´t take care of it Your self, it must be trained people (they get a license to help hurt animals from the city) to help them. If there isn´t such a person nerby You have to leave the animal to die. I don´t think any Sweed would do that, we have a tendensy to love animals more than humans and laws :-) I wouldn´t care about that law if I once again found an injured animal.

There wasn´t a bird in sight when I came home today, so I just put in the same picture of the Kaja i did yesterday :-)

Because that´s what happened when Robert came into my life. Robert was a Kaja (I found an American name for it I belive, Eurasian jackdaw) and that is a small (as big as a city dove) relative to the crow. I found him right after I had found a dead bird in a rat trap I had by my dogyard in Gotheburg. Normally I perhaps wouldn´t care so much about a hurt kaja, but after seeing the other bird in the rat trap I couldn´t just let it be :-) he (or she. I couldn´t see a difference) had broken his wing and was easy pray for any wild or tame animal. Even if he couldn´t fly he was really difficult to capture and when caught him he kept on struggeling. I have to admit that I was surprised over how strong he was in his beak. He didn´t let go when he got a grip on my finger and I thought I would loose it :-)

I didn´t feel like walking in the forest today, but regreted that decision when it started snowing :-)

Unfortunally the wing never healed properly so he could never fly again, but that didn´t stop him at all :-) The first two weeks he really hated me. If he could he aimed his beak towards my eyes and he bit me several times, but suddenly one day he got nice. Think he must have realised that he had to stay with me for the rest of his life and he was smart enough not to bite the hand that fed him :-) That did not however mean that he was kind to the other animals I had in my home :-) Espesially my cats were in grave danger when he was on the loose in the appartement. If they were asleep he very quietly walked to them and then take a strong grip in one of their ears and starting to pull away :-) He could grip some whiskers and pull them right out of the poor cats.

My dogs however he could be real nice to. If he could take a cookie from the table he then jumped down to one of them sharing it or just looking through their fur. I was only in danger when he was bored :-) he knew that it was forbidden to tare the wallpaper in small pieces. So if he wanted my attention he jumped to the nearest wallpaper and started to tare small pieces from it . He got my attetion I can say :-) There was only one problem with Robert, he smelled awful! I had to have a window open all year in his room (Yes he had a room for him self when I wasn´t at home). I don´t know if all birds in the crow family smells as bad as he did, but it was awful! Being an outdoorbird he didn´t mind having the window open.

I woke up this mornig and saw that it had snowed rather much this late night. It´s gone on the ground down in the village, but it can still be seen on the mountine.

In summer I had him at my dogyard. The place the dogyard were at was really built like an allotement garden. We had a small cottage (the doghouse) and a small garden and high fences. I actully think that it was the only place like that in Sweden. So I had my dogs there when I was at work. When I came home I fetched my dogs and went home or I could stay and sleep the night there. In that garden of mine I had a small apple tree and Robert lived there during summer. It´s easy to learn a Kaja how to speak, they are oftyen better at that then parrots, and so he sat there in the apple tree shouting what ever he had learned :-) Kajor can be really old, but Robert wasn´t that lucky. One day (a neighbour told me) he was walking around in the garden when a falcon took him. I hope that he didn´t have to suffer too long at least.

A sure sign of spring, they have started to spread manure over the fields.

So if I ever come across an injured Kaja or Crow I wouldn´t heasitate helping it, even if it wouldn´t be able to fly again. They are incrediable fun and intelligent birds, but this time it would have to be in a big cage outside. That smell is hard to forget :-)
Be good!