In what could be a pilot scheme for the new Abbott Paid Parental Leave (PPL) scheme, the Queen of the Jungle , slowly recovering from her knee operation , now looks after a
Coucal during the day . She calls
the bird Dracula , yet it has another , less scary monicker , Prickles , because it looked like a bundle of spikes as a babe .
Dracula / Prickles narrowly escaped the blood lust
of a Kookaburra attacking a Coucal family
with three chicks. While the parents
seemed able to defend
two chicks from the merciless onslaught , the third
one looked like succumbing to the attack.
An onlooker saved the seemingly doomed bird
after
the rest of the family escaped into the bush . It was taken to the
couple who run the island’s popular Mexican restaurant,
Man Friday , Bev and Jason, who have long looked after many injured
and stressed birds. In fact they have just been handed a troubled Galah .
Bev is shown here with the small Coucal, looking like a Kiwi, soon after it was
saved . As
Prickles grows , she regularly takes him down to the Queen of the Jungle’s residence and places him in what amounts to day care in a large
aviary so that
he can get used to other
birds and exercise . The Queen , shuffling
about , talks to him through the wire , addressing him as Dracula, the name given to another of his kind, because he was plain ugly , she looked after years ago. The Coucal parades about in the same cage in which Miss Wong , the Torres Strait Pigeon, cavorted before eventually escaping to the rainforest at Mission Beach .
