Bertie came in to us in December from a local vet. He weighed a mere 276g, about a third of what his weight should have been. The first few days were quite honestly awful. It didn’t seem to matter what we offered Bertie, he just wasn’t really interested in food. After a few days of antibiotics, his appetite picked up slightly but by this time he weighed 235g a truly worrying weight drop. We had resorted by this time to pipette feeding him chicken complan. We offered him a meal of chicken cat food both dried and wet and some dried mealworms which had just been bought for some blackbirds in one of the aviaries. We fed him his liquid food and left him to rest overnight. The following morning we were amazed to see that he had demolished absolutely everything! From then it seems to have been plain sailing and Bertie now weighs around 500g. However, he has now started coughing, a sure sign of the condition, lungworm! He will therefore have to have a 3 weeks course of treatment to kill off the worm which is believed to be passed on to young Autumn orphans by their mothers through the placenta or by the ingestion of slugs and snails that are hosts to the worm eggs. At the end of that time, he will hopefully be big enough to go into the outdoor enclosure where he can hibernate until Spring.