Pankee

The sole survivor from a clutch of five lovebird hatchlings. For some reason, his siblings were dying all over the place. Not wanting to completely lose my very first batch of lovebirds, I decided to take matters into my own hands and handfeed him myself, as I suspected the other chicks’ deaths to be a cause of their parents’ neglect.

He was nothing more than a 3-day old little pink blob when I took him out of the nest, and truth be told, I really didn’t think he’d last long. Turns out the little guy has more fight in him than I do, and he held on like a champ.

I put him in one of those plastic pet things, the kind I used to employ as snake enclosures, placed right beside my PC. I’d line it with paper towels that I would change after every feeding — which was every hour, round the clock during the first week; every 2 hours during the second week; then every 3 hours until he was able to take on food by himself. The longest five weeks of my life.

I don’t know if it was my having raised him on Cerelac (banana, s’yempre!) or his having been exposed to the intarwebs his entire life that had a hand in his growing up to be such an intelligent, yellow ball of fluff.

I love the little bastard. <3