RACHEL Allan, an education officer with the Scottish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SSPCA) came to Merkinch Primary last month to talk to the children following an unfortunate incident the last weekend in May.
A group of around five girls, including some from MPS, had climbed on the asbestos roof of a building in Carsegate Road South and taken numbers of eggs and newly-hatched herring gull chicks from their nests.
Kenneth Hughes, who lives in Cameron Road and voluntarily takes care of wild birds for the SSPCA, told News & Views, “They were lucky not to have injured themselves. It seemed they wanted the chicks as pets.
“Of the 16 chicks that were brought to me, 13 are doing well,” he said. “The five eggs had got cold and could not be saved, however.”
Nine of the chicks came in on the Saturday and the rest on the Sunday. “Some of them had been found by a parent in their shed. The girls were trying to feed them worms.”
Some of the younger girls and other children at the school had been very upset by the incident.
In an average year Mr Hughes cares for around 400 birds that have come to grief one way or another. Eighty per cent of them recover from their injuries and are returned successfully to the wild. “People don’t always realise it is best not to handle unnecessarily garden birds that have, perhaps, fallen from their nests. They stand a better chance if they are left to their parents .”
Herring gulls build their nests in April, usually in quite exposed places, and the young hatch out around the end of May. Next year the SSPCA are intending to come and give the youngsters a pep talk before the nesting season begins.