by Helen Peters
Jasmine lowered Lucky into the pen. The ewe turned her head and sniffed the little lamb. Then, with a movement so swift that it took Dad and Jasmine completely by surprise, she lowered her broad head and butted him away! Lucky flew across the pen and landed in the straw, sprawled out and winded.
For Rosie and Jack
H. P.
For Papa
E. S.
Like Baby Dinosaurs
“We have to go in for lunch now, Truffle,” said Jasmine, scratching her pet pig behind the ears. “We’ll come and see you again this afternoon.”
The huge sow gave a contented grunt and lay down under an apple tree. It was hard to believe it now, but Truffle had been a tiny little runt when Jasmine had found her. Jasmine and her best friend Tom were planning to run an animal rescue centre when they grew up, and Truffle had been their first rescue animal.
In the farmhouse scullery, Jasmine’s cats, Toffee and Marmite, lay curled up in their bed on the work surface. Her collie dog, Sky, was sleeping in his basket on the floor.
“Look at him,” said Jasmine. “That training session tired him out.”
Jasmine had found Sky last summer, abandoned and starving. He was a year old now, and Jasmine was training him as a sheepdog.
“We’ll be able to give him loads of training now it’s the holidays,” said Tom.
“Is that you, Jas?” called her mum from the kitchen. “Wash your hands and come in for lunch.”
“Coming,” called Jasmine.
The rest of her family was already sitting around the kitchen table. Sixteen-year-old Ella had a book propped open in front of her, as usual. Manu, who was six, was wriggling in his chair and chomping noisily on a sandwich, scattering crumbs all around him.
Jasmine handed Tom a bread roll and took one herself. She reached across the table for the cheese.
“Is there any pudding?” asked Manu.
“There’s fruit in the bowl,” said Mum.
“Didn’t you do cooking at school yesterday?” asked Dad. “I thought you said you were making biscuits.”
“That’s right, you did,” said Mum. “As an Easter present for your family. Are they still in your book bag?”
Manu looked sheepish. “Oh, yes,” he said. “I’ll get them.”
He walked over to the pegs on the wall. From his book bag, he produced a clear plastic box. It contained one small biscuit.
“Is that it?” asked Dad. “You made one biscuit?”
“Yes,” said Manu, studiously avoiding all eye contact.
“Really?” said Mum. “You spent all afternoon making one biscuit?”
“Yes.”
Everyone’s eyes were fixed on Manu as he looked down at the table. After a few seconds, he glanced up at his family. Then he looked down again.
“I might have made more than one,” he said.
“Oh?” said Dad. “What happened to the others?”
“They fell on the floor.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“Really?” said Dad. “Would that have been the floor of your stomach?”
Mum tried not to laugh. “I guess you’ve already had your pudding, then,” she said. “Have some fruit if you’re still hungry.”
“Shall me and Tom check the sheep after lunch?” asked Jasmine.
“That would be great,” said Dad. “Then Mum and I can get on with the TB testing.”
Jasmine’s dad was a farmer and her mum was a vet. That afternoon they were going to be testing the cows for TB. All the cows had to be tested every year to stop the disease from spreading.
“Ben’s mum is picking you up at two o’clock,” Mum said to Manu. “Ella, can you make sure he’s ready, please?”
Ella, deep in her book, didn’t respond. Mum repeated the request.
“What?” said Ella, vaguely.
Mum sighed. “Manu, go and get your swimming things now, will you? Then you’ll be ready to go when Ben gets here.”
Ben was Manu’s best friend. Like Tom, he spent as much time at the farm as he could, but because Mum and Dad were working this afternoon, Ben’s mum was taking them both swimming.
Dad was reading an article in the Farmers Weekly. “There’s a lot of sheep rustling about at the moment,” he said. “This poor bloke in Yorkshire had his whole flock taken.”
“How can anyone steal a whole flock of sheep?” asked Manu.
“Well-trained dogs and a big lorry,” said Dad.
“Will they take our sheep?”
Dad shook his head. “This is all hundreds of miles away.”
“Come on, Tom,” said Jasmine, stuffing the last of her roll into her mouth. “Let’s go and see the lambs.”
Lambing season was Jasmine’s favourite time of year at Oak Tree Farm, and the lambing barn was her favourite place. And now, she thought happily, she had two whole weeks with no school and new lambs being born every day.
They could hear the lambs long before they saw them. Their high-pitched bleats and their mothers’ low answering calls could be heard all across the farmyard. To a stranger, each lamb and each ewe might sound the same, but every one of those lambs could recognise its mother’s call amongst the baaing of a hundred other ewes, and every ewe could tell the cry of her own lamb.
The big barn was divided into pens with metal hurdles. Along the left-hand side were rows of small pens, each containing a single ewe and her lambs. Most of these had only been born yesterday. In the largest pen were the sheep with older lambs. They would be taken out to the field in a few days’ time.
Jasmine scanned the animals for any signs of trouble. Sometimes a lamb that had seemed perfectly healthy would suddenly die for no apparent reason. But they all looked well this afternoon.
She turned her attention to the most exciting pen of all, where the sheep still waiting to lamb were kept. A smile spread across her face as she saw a ewe standing in the middle of the pen with two tiny newborn lambs sucking vigorously from her udder, wiggling their little tails as they fed.
“Look,” she said to Tom. “Aren’t they gorgeous?”
It never ceased to amaze Jasmine that newborn lambs somehow always knew exactly what they needed to do. Just a few minutes after they were born, they would heave themselves up on their wobbly legs, stagger to their mother’s udder and start to drink.
Unless there was something wrong, of course. That was why somebody had to check the sheep every few hours. But there was nothing wrong with these two.
Jasmine and Tom scattered fresh straw on the floor and filled up the hay racks and water buckets. When they were finished, Tom said, “Shall we go and give Sky another training session?”
They were about to leave the barn when Jasmine glimpsed something bright yellow lying in the straw. She bent down to examine it, and drew in her breath.
“What is it?” asked Tom. He crouched beside her.
“Oh!” he gasped.
The flash of yellow that Jasmine had seen was the edge of a beak. It belonged to a tiny baby bird, sprawled in the straw. And now Jasmine saw another identical baby bird, nearly buried in the straw beside it.
They must have been almost newly hatched, because their eyes were closed and they had no feathers at all, just shiny skin, pink with patches of scaly grey on the wings and head, and a grey line down the back.
You couldn’t really call them cute. In fact, they were remarkably ugly. They looked more like baby dinosaurs than birds.
“They must have fallen out of the nest,” said Tom. “I can’t believe they’re still alive.”
They watched the birds’ tiny chests rise and fall with their heartbeats.
“They won’t survive much longer on their own,” said Jasmine. “We have to do something
to help them.”
The Right Thing to Do
“We need to put them back in their nest,” said Tom.
They stepped back and scanned the big metal beams that held up the barn roof. Where the beams criss-crossed each other, there were plenty of nooks and crannies where a bird could have built a nest.
Careful not to tread on the baby birds, Jasmine walked a few paces forwards to look from the other side.
“I can’t see a nest,” said Tom.
“Me neither,” said Jasmine. “And we couldn’t put them back up there anyway. Those beams are way too high, even for Dad’s massive ladder.”
“Anyway, their parents might have rejected them on purpose,” said Tom, “so if we put them back, they might push them out again.”
“Or there might be more than one nest up there,” said Jasmine, “and then we wouldn’t know which one to put them in. If we put them in the wrong one, the parents would push them out. And they might not survive another fall.”
“So,” said Tom, looking excited, “I guess we’re going to have to look after them ourselves.”
Jasmine grinned at him. “I guess we are.”
“Do you know what they eat?”
“No, but we can look it up. Mum would know, but we can’t ask her while she’s TB testing, and she won’t be finished for hours.”
“Come on, then,” said Tom. “Let’s take them indoors.”
“I’ll get something to put them in,” said Jasmine, walking over to the pen where Dad kept the lambing supplies. She found an empty plastic tub and filled it with straw. Gently, she picked up the baby birds, laid them in the tub and packed straw around them to keep them warm. Then she and Tom walked back to the house. It was very quiet, so Manu must have left for swimming. The house was never quiet when Manu was around.
They sat the tub on the kitchen table and Tom fetched Mum’s laptop from her office. He typed “orphaned newborn bird” into the search engine and clicked on the website of a wildlife charity.
“Oh,” he said. “That’s not very helpful.”
“What does it say?” asked Jasmine.
“It says they probably won’t survive.”
“Why not?”
“It says rearing a baby bird is time-consuming and difficult, and the chance of success is very low. It says you should only attempt it as a last resort, and you should really take it to an expert rehabilitator.”
“I bet that’s what Mum will say,” said Jasmine. “Like she wanted us to take Button to the wildlife rehabilitator. It’s lucky she’s not here.”
Last spring, Jasmine and Tom had rescued a clutch of duck eggs from the riverbank, after the mother duck was killed by a dog. Button had hatched from one of the eggs, and now he was a handsome drake who lived with the free-range chickens.
“What about when she comes in, though?” asked Tom. “She might make us take them to a rehabilitator.”
“We’ll just have to prove we can look after them ourselves,” said Jasmine. “If we learn what to do, and we do everything it says, I don’t see how we’d be any different from a professional.” The first thing to do, they discovered, was to keep the birds warm in a nest made from a bowl lined with tissues, placed on top of a hot water bottle.
Tom filled the kettle and switched it on, while Jasmine lined a small plastic bowl with tissues. When the kettle boiled, Tom filled the hot water bottle and they sat the baby birds in their new nest on top of it.
“It says you should put the nest in a quiet, dark place where it won’t be disturbed,” said Tom.
“Nowhere where Manu can get to it, then,” said Jasmine.
“What about your wardrobe?” Tom suggested.
“Yes, that might work. I’ll have to be really careful to keep the bedroom door closed, though, so the cats can’t get in.”
“It’s only for a couple of weeks,” said Tom, looking at the website. “Once they start to hop about, you’re meant to put them in a cage and leave it outdoors during the daytime, so they can get used to the outside world.”
One of the birds stretched its head and neck up high and started to chirp. Its beak opened so wide that it looked as though its head would split in two.
“Wow,” said Tom, as the other bird started to chirp, too. “They’re really hungry.”
“What does it say we should give them to eat?” asked Jasmine.
Tom scrolled down the page. “Canned cat food mashed up with water.”
“Oh, good, that’s easy. It’s lucky we have cats.”
“You have to use tweezers to drop tiny pieces into the back of their mouths,” said Tom, “and wipe the beak clean with cotton wool afterwards.”
“I’ll get the tweezers and cotton wool,” said Jasmine, “and you mash up the cat food.”
When she came back, Tom had mashed cat food and water into a revolting-looking brown paste. “You’re supposed to feed them pieces about half the size of your little fingernail,” he said.
Jasmine looked at her little fingernail. “That’s tiny. Do you want to feed them?”
“We can take turns,” said Tom. “You go first.”
Jasmine picked up a little piece of food with the tweezers. She held the tweezers over the first gaping beak and dropped the food in.
The tiny creature gulped it down. Jasmine did the same with the other bird. It was very satisfying to see them eat.
She passed the tweezers to Tom. “How much do we feed them?” she asked.
“It says they just stop when they’re full,” said Tom. “They only eat a little at a time, but you have to feed them every half an hour.”
“Every half an hour! At night, too?”
“No, just in the daytime.”
“Phew.” Jasmine didn’t mind the idea of getting up in the middle of the night, but twice every hour did sound a bit much.
After a few mouthfuls, the birds closed their beaks. Jasmine wiped them clean. Then she looked at her watch to see when they would need their next feed.
“Lucky it’s school holidays,” she said, “or we’d never be able to do it.”
“I wonder what type of bird they are,” said Tom. He searched online for a chart to identify baby birds, but so many of the babies looked alike that it was impossible to tell for certain.
“We’ll have to wait until they get feathers,” said Jasmine.
“What shall we call them?” asked Tom.
Jasmine thought for a minute. “This one can be Peanut,” she said. “That’s a good name for a bird.”
“Peanut,” said Tom, thoughtfully. “And the other one can be Popcorn.”
“Peanut and Popcorn,” said Jasmine. “Perfect.”
“It says you can mark them with a little dab of food colouring on the top of their heads, to tell them apart,” said Tom.
“Oh, that will be so cute.”
“I bet they’ll miss their parents,” Tom said.
“We’ll have to pet them a lot,” said Jasmine, “to make up for it.”
“Do you want to keep them as pets?” asked Tom.
Jasmine shook her head. “No. I hate seeing birds in cages. I want to release them when they’re ready.”
“Then you can’t pet them.” Tom scrolled up the page. “It says if we pet them, or even talk to them, they’ll imprint on us, and then they won’t ever be able to live in the wild.”
Jasmine knew about imprinting. Baby birds become attached to the first thing they see, and think it’s their mother. Button had imprinted on Jasmine, and she had loved having a duckling as a companion. But ducks were different, and Button lived happily in the farmyard with the chickens now. If Peanut and Popcorn became attached to her, they would never be able to live in the wild with other birds. They would have to be pets forever.
She looked at the tiny creatures in their nest of tissues. Jasmine loved having pets and she was constantly trying to persuade her parents to take on more animals. But it felt so wrong that creatures who were born to fly freely should be kept in a space w
here all they could do was hop from perch to perch.
“I want them to be able to live in the wild,” she said. “So we mustn’t talk to them or pet them.”
“That’s going to be so hard,” said Tom.
“I know. But it’s the right thing to do.”
Are You Up to Something?
Much later that afternoon, the back door rattled open. Tom had just finished feeding Popcorn and Peanut for the eighth time.
“Jasmine, Tom!” It was Mum’s voice. “Are you up there?”
“Quick,” said Jasmine. “Put them in the wardrobe.”
Tom placed the nest in the bottom of the wardrobe and closed the door. Jasmine pushed the food bowl, tweezers and cotton wool under her bed, just as Mum appeared in the doorway, a pile of folded laundry in her arms.
“Sorry that took so long,” she said. “You must be starving.”
Jasmine’s attention had been so focused on the chicks that she had forgotten about dinner, but now she realised she was really hungry.
“I thought you might like to go out for pizza,” said Mum, “since it’s the first day of the holidays. And also because I haven’t bought anything for dinner.”
Jasmine’s mouth watered at the thought of her favourite food. Pizza was Tom’s favourite, too. But she knew he was thinking the same thing as she was. They caught each other’s eyes anxiously.
“Er … actually, can we stay in?” she asked. “We can just have beans on toast or something. We’re not that hungry.”
Mum stared at her. “But you love going out for pizza. I thought you’d be really excited.”
“I know. Sorry. Thank you. It’s just… We’re kind of in the middle of something. Making something.”
Mum scanned the floor. “I can’t see anything. What are you making?”
Jasmine could have kicked herself. Why had she said they were making something?
“I mean, making up something. Poems. It’s our holiday homework, to write a poem.”