Merlin the macaw spreading his wings at new home in Ontario
CBC
A beloved Halifax mascot has finally made a friend and his health seems to be improving, according to the Ontario nature park where he is rehabilitating.
For 20 years, Merlin the Rainbow Macaw greeted visitors at the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic until he had to retire due to declining health.
During COVID, Merlin had fewer interactions with his human friends. He plucked his own feathers, a behaviour some birds exhibit when under stress.
His caregivers decided to find Merlin a new home last spring so he could recover. Perhaps he could make new flying friends and learn to be a bird after being surrounded by humans his entire life.
Taryn Hipkiss, the general manager at Safari Niagara, said Merlin's feathers have regrown and he now shares a staff-only enclosure with Kiki, a female blue and gold macaw.
"We feel that Merlin is making some good progress," she said, noting he might be in an outdoor display open to the public this summer if his progress continues.
When Merlin arrived, Hipkiss said there were concerns about his mobility as he would hesitate to leave his perch.
While Merlin can't fly yet, Hipkiss said his caregivers made a plan to make him walk around his enclosure as much as possible.
"His and Kiki's food is strategically placed so that he is encouraged to travel with locomotion," she said.
The staff also had to diversify Merlin's diet and encourage him to bathe himself.
"We've also introduced easy foraging options to help him [be] interested in exploring his entire space," she said. "So this is to teach him and encourage foraging and independent natural parrot behaviour.
"[Bathing was] something that Merlin was very hesitant for and showed no interest in in the beginning."
Hipkiss said the team at Safari Niagara has also paid attention to Merlin's social life.
Parrots are very social birds that can become depressed if they are kept alone, she said.
Miles Purden started noticing woodpeckers taking aim at his home in North Kamloops in 2020.
Flu cases are on the rise across the province, while immunization uptake is the lowest it's been in more than a decade, two infectious disease experts say.
At his ranch in Black Pines, just outside Kamloops, B.C., Ed LeBourdais knows how to get his bulls' attention.
Anxiety is the most common reason Island students are turning to well-being teams in schools, says a social worker involved with a P.E.I. support program.
Pauline Frost, chief of the Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation in northern Yukon, usually looks forward to late January, when the winter sun returns to her Arctic village.
This story is part of Welcome to Canada, a CBC News series about immigration told through the eyes of the people who have experienced it.
Will it be sticker shock for Toronto homeowners again this year?
Researchers at the University of Waterloo say they've made a breakthrough in introducing a new trait into bacteria found in wastewater, giving them the ability to break down microplastics.
Aircraft dropped water and fire retardant on steep hills, and ground firefighting efforts were stepped up in a bid to stem the eastward spread of the Palisades wildfire in Los Angeles on Saturday, amid new predictions of wind gusts that could hit 110 kilometres per hour.
Seven people are in custody following a raid on a home on Mundy Pond Road in St. John's on Saturday.
Four people were taken to hospital, at least one with serious injuries, after a fire early Saturday in a duplex in Lower Sackville, N.S.