A Morning at Kanyana

Monique recently began volunteering at Kanyana. Read about her first day experiences…

I had been giving a lot of thought as to how I could put some of my time and effort back into the local community and decided that I was especially interested in working with native wildlife. I first heard of Kanyana in “Return to Eden” on the ABC TV some months before and decided to check out Kanyana’s website.
I discovered that Kanyana is always looking for new volunteers and I was soon registered and signed up for a morning shift.

I started my first day as a volunteer at Kanyana with great excitement and some trepidation. Exactly what would I be doing? What sort of animals would I be working with and who would I be working with?

I arrived at 8:30am and was introduced to my shift supervisor and given a quick tour of Kanyana’s facilities. This included meeting the bilbies in the Endangered Species Breeding program, the educational animals that visit schools, animals that are ready to be released and the newly admitted animals in the hospital hot boxes.

As I soon discovered when I walked outside of the hospital and was nearly deafened by the noise of hungry squawking magpies, one of the first jobs on the morning shift is making meat pellets and hand feeding baby maggies.

When the maggies were fed and quiet, I worked with the other volunteers feeding other less noisy birds, including magpie-larks, rainbow lorikeet, kookaburras, red wattle birds and Tok Tot the nankeen night heron.

Feeding the birds involved chopping fruit, measuring seed and grain, mixing fresh nectar, defrosting frozen mince and making more of those meat pellets. Then it was into the enclosures to put out fresh food and change the water. It was great to see the birds up close and most of them tucked into their food straight away! What about meal-worms?

I continued with the cleaning of the cages, raking up droppings and leftover food and scrubbing the wire sides of the enclosures. As droppings are one of the main sources of infection between birds, hygiene is vitally important.

Meanwhile some of the other volunteers were working in the bilby enclosures. This involves checking that the bilbies were actually there – they are master escape artists! Weighing leftover food to see how much they had eaten sifting the sand to remove food and droppings and replacing food and water containers.
As with all animals in captivity, hygiene is critically important.

We all had a break for morning tea and I got to meet some of the other volunteers. A number of the volunteers had worked at Kanyana for many years and were experienced in the handling and care of wildlife, while others, like me, were there on their first day. There was a good mix of ages and experience and it was good to feel part of a very special team.
.