Yesterday I blogged sadly about how one of my budgies, the female, Syrup, had escaped through me not noticing a door in the cage had been knocked slightly open.

syrup escaped2

She hung around all evening and we had fun watching her swooping around the place. She was still close by this morning, on the telephone wire, then the house roof – and then on the cage, nibbling at a millet stalk hung on the side.

Aha, we thought. We might be in with a chance to get our budgie back.

We worked through a few ideas and the best we came up with was to move Maple to the rat trap and have him as a decoy and rig up the cage so that a door was open for her to fly into to get at some tempting millet. My budgies adore their millet. Chris came up with a devious way of using fishing line and a reel that could be operated from inside the house by a budgie trap observer, i.e. Rors.

Maple wasn’t keen on being caught and sunk his beak firmly into my finger once I managed to grab him, but I can’t blame him. He was bundled carefully into the trap, since we can’t find the proper door, I tied a black sack over the open end. He was put out on the bench next to the booby trapped cage.

budgie trap1

 

All we needed now was for him to start calling to his mate and her for greed to come into play.

Chris and I took the dogs for a walk and left Rors poised at the operational end of the trap.

budgie trap3

And lo and behold, when we came back, we were rebudgied! She’d flown around for a while then finally popped inside for a quick snack, and Rors with his lightning reflexes activated the door release. And Syrup was back in the cage.

budgie trap4

 

Now we just have to get Maple safely back in with her… We’ll definitely be doing that indoors!