You've been reading about Dum, my kauwow friend, and now you can see him in 'person'.
This video shows one of my final encounters with this bird, before he returned to the wild permanently.
Dum is one of several success stories that brings me great joy and satisfaction. There are no words to express the satisfaction of watching a bird that would have surely died falling from such a tall tree, to seeing his recovery and finally to experience him as a free soul.
This particular kauwow was one of the worst pains I'd yet encountered in that he demanded and was generally extremely aggressive in his behaviour. I made it a point not to try and change that, since I felt that this aggression might well save his life one day. Instead, the goal was to help him heal and grow in his own natural way and then return him to nature in the best possible condition.
His release was determined by his tail which was very quickly getting long. Keeping him in the cage would have resulted in his damaging the tail and therefore making flying difficult at best. Even though it was still obvious that he didn't know how to eat on his own, the decision was made to release him anyway.
It was the choice of the lesser of two evils in a sense. Several nuns watched as I carried this screaming youngster to a grassy area with a broken chedi or stupa, flung him towards the stupa and watched him land and immediately take off, landing in the tamarind tree nearby. Everybody was stunned!! Not only could Dum fly, he flew with a speed and grace that surprised everybody, most of all me! There were the nods of appreciation for what had transpired and we all returned to our individual huts.
As for me....I thought that was the end of it.....how wrong I was!!
Two days after his release, I heard that familiar cry coming from very close to my hut. It took a while before I figured out where he was, but there was Dum, waiting to be fed! Quickly checking to see if any of the cats were nearby, I had to make him come down if he hoped to be fed. Hunger won the day and he had his first greedy meal of the day. On another occassion, I was sitting on the steps of my hut, and before I knew it, Dum was sitting on the bench next to my hut demanding to be fed. I panicked! This I could not allow! It would almost certainly signal a free meal for the neighborhood cats! I threw a slipper at Dum if ever I saw him on anything lower than the cage in the video. Who says that kauwows can't be trained?? Whatever the case is, Dum learned very quickly that not only was he not going to be fed, he was going to get something thrown at him if he landed in the wrong place!!
Unlike other birds, kauwows do not know how to care for their young, leaving the chicks to be raised by other birds, mostly mynah birds. Dum still had the call of an out of tune mynah bird and it will take a long time before he learns that he is indeed a kauwow. My two females took some eight months before they started the appropriate call for their species! That also means that this bird matures fairly slowly. I am told that they have a long life too...some ten years or more.
After having several kauwows in my care who had fallen out of the nest, I couldn't help but ask myself, why this was happening with such frequency. Only recently did the answer occur to me. The mynah bird makes a nest for its own chicks, yet the kauwow chick is almost as big as an adult minor bird, so much so that any small movement within the nest will cause one chick to fall out.
In conclusion, Dum was in my care, caged for 3 weeks and fed as a free bird for another 3 weeks before he was integrated back into nature fully. Less than a month after Dum had regained his freedom, I was in for another surprise! I had cleaned out my hut for the coming Buddhist Lent and was sitting on the staircase sipping a cup of coffee. It was then that I noticed something moving on the bushes in front of my house. The husky/local mixed dog was really excited...the cat was excited.....yet neither of them could get to the chick that had fallen out of the same tree as Dum had. Low and behold, here was another male kauwow chick, this time the brown species. He was barely alive, having lain on the bushes for several hours already. When I picked this one up,I discovered that he was basically naked. His feathers had emerged and were still covered with a shieth of sorts. He was kept inside my hut for a few days and steadily grew stronger. This male is very different from Dum in that he is sooooo soft in his manner. I call him Nim, which means soft in thai.
Meanwhile he is in an outside cage now and has become just as loud as Dum, but minus the aggression.
Hopefully before the middle of August, another one will have gained his freedom as well.
Nim finally won his freedom in late August. Unlike Dum, he only returned 3 times before flying away for good. He did give 3 of us nuns a surprise though, when he showed up again, approximately 2 weeks after his release.
Sitting in the tree right near my hut, he was a sight for sore eyes. We observed him for some time, satisfaction on all our faces.......
Dum disappeared for some 3 months. One morning I had the most unusual encounter with him again. As a young male, he was silently perched on the tree right in front of my hut and sat very silently, so as not to arouse the attention of the other males. He had grown a little bit, but the important thing was that now he had come back as a free bird. All the birds that I released, had come back between 1 and 3 months, as if to say thank you for saving their lives. Each time such a bird came back, there is no way to describe the inner satisfaction that fills me. This is reward at its finest.....
[FOOT-NOTE] After many unsuccessfull searches for the appropriate name for this bird, I finally found it!!
It's actually an Asian Koel, very common in Thailand.
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