Flight of fancy carries lonely shag to safety

JOHN SELKIRK/Fairfax NZ

TRAVEL PRIORITIES: Lonely Sandy, the shag who took the high route to Bird Rescue in Titirangi. Looking on are Ellie and Trent Davis.

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It's the holiday shag Narelle Davis will never forget.

Last week, $2000 could have bought a decent second-hand car. Or an overseas trip. But in the wake of the New Year storms that hit Coromandel, that was the amount Davis forked out to fly an injured juvenile cormorant to the safety of an Auckland bird rescue centre.

Bird-brained? "I'd do it again," she told the Sunday Star-Times, on a visit to the aviary where rescued shag, Lonely Sandy, now shares cage space with another hurt seabird.

Davis was making pancakes at the family's Sandy Bay bach at remote Port Charles when her children reported the bird, waddling up the beachfront road, in the path of an oncoming tractor.

"He just looked like a drowned rat. The weather had been terrible." Davis grabbed a towel and carried the shag – presumed knocked from his nest by high winds – inside their fenced property. He escaped the first night, but waddled back for breakfast.

Davis's children, Trent, 11, and Ellie, 7, were determined he wouldn't be taken by a neighbourhood cat. They built him a shelter and painted "do not enter signs", taking turns guarding the wayward cormorant who required eight freshly caught sprats a day.

Lonely Sandy still can't fly, but his rescue has set websites aflutter. "How much would you pay for a shag?" was one of the highest ranking stories on Stuff last week, after first appearing in Auckland's Western Leader. Why did the Davis family do it? Trent: "Because it's nice having non-human things like animals. It would be boring if there was just humans around."

At Auckland's Green Bay Bird Rescue centre, Lyn Macdonald prepares seafood marinara for nine kingfishers raised as babies when the tree they were nesting in was cut down. From behind a counter, she pulls two jars of lethal hooks, lures and sinkers – all cut from seabirds caught in fishing lines.

She's been in the business 27 years. The hooks and lures she says, "are the other side of the Lonely Sandy story". Human and bird interactions where people didn't care as much as this family.

"We get people who do terrible things. It's nice to have special people around."

The day before Narelle and Gavin Davis and their children reunited with Lonely Sandy (named for the bay where he was found, and her lonely state at the time), they were burgled. Last year, their business burnt down and Narelle was dealing with serious health concerns. "It has been ... a difficult time," says Davis.

So, when her kids fell in love with Sandy, and the weather was too bad to bring the bird out on the boat they'd travelled to the bach in, she rang a helicopter company.

"At the end of the day, animals were here before we were.

"They just love you unconditionally ... a huge reason [we did it] was that the children had just spent so much time looking after him. I didn't want to see him caught by a dog or a cat.

"Gavin and I don't do anything for each other at Christmas and I thought, `well, we'll splash out and be crazy'."

Heletranz pilot Jude Scott says he's done a lot of things in his 10 years of flying. "But I've never had a shag on board." How was it for him? "An experience I'll never forget." Lonely Sandy travelled in style, standing upright in two upturned plastic supermarket baskets strapped together with electrical ties. Scott says the bird simply fell asleep. "It's the noise and the motion – it happens to kids too."

Last week, Sandy was back to his wilder ways, squawking for branch space with his Rescue Centre cage mate. Macdonald says he will eventually be relocated to a colony at Panmure.

She says the centre, which can receive up to 30 birds a day, had dealt with many birds who had been knocked from their nests by high winds in early January.

"We had seven herons come in all at once ..." The centre, which relies entirely on donations, doesn't differentiate between species. "Each individual is important and that's what animal welfare is all about."

Last week, Macdonald was trying to rehome a muscovy duck with one leg. Narelle Davis's face softens. She looks at her kids and husband. "A duck ...?"

To donate food, supplies, money or your time to a rescue centre in your area: www.birdrescue.org

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