How to Care for Injured Rainbow Lorikeets

Rainbow lorikeets are small, colorful birds native to the south of Australia. A healthy wild lorikeet lives in trees and never rests on the ground, so if you find one on ground level, it is almost certainly injured or ill. Before you take it home to care for it yourself, call your local conservation society and tell them you have found an injured bird; in some areas, you need a permit to legally care for a wild animal at home.

Things You'll Need

  • Cardboard box
  • Heat lamp
  • Sugar-water
  • Egg
  • Baby cereal
  • Syringe
  • Masking tape
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Instructions

    • 1

      Place the bird in a cardboard box in a warm room, or warm it with a heat lamp. Make sure the box is ventilated so the bird can breathe.

    • 2

      Offer the bird food immediately. Lorikeets eat nectar, not seeds, so beat an egg into some sugar-water and feed the mixture to the bird three times a day. Remove left-over food when the bird has finished eating.

    • 3

      Feed baby rainbow lorikeets the same mixture with some protein-fortified baby cereal mixed in. Give them their food warm.

    • 4

      Observe a rainbow lorikeet who has a swollen chest while it eats to make sure the food does not trickle out of the bird's nostrils. If it does, hold the bird upright and hand-feed it slowly with a syringe.

    • 5

      Cover the box with a heavy cloth if the bird has a broken leg, and keep the bird inside it for two weeks. The cloth helps keep the bird calm and still while the fracture heals. Splint the leg with masking tape if you can see bone fragments poking through the skin; if you cannot, leave the leg unbound.

    • 6

      Check the rainbow lorikeet's flight ability before releasing it. Take it to an aviary and observe its flight, making sure it can fly up and down as well as level. Listen to its breath when it lands and make sure it is breathing easily.

    • 7

      Release a healed bird into a flock of other rainbow lorikeets, after it has eaten in the morning. If you rescued it when it was a baby, release it in the company of an older bird who can teach it how to survive in the wild.