Wansteadium reader Tom D writes:
On 4th December the residents of Woodlands Avenue received the sad news that one of their most unusual residents – a White-Cheeked Turaco known to everyone as ‘Bob’ – had passed away.
Nobody knows quite when Bob appeared in our area, but he’s been stealing blueberries and unsuccessfully trying to charm local chickens for well over a decade. His ‘whoop whoop’ call was a regular sound of summer evenings.
Bob must have escaped from captivity, but successfully survived many winters in the local area.
He’d been taken ill a few months ago, with problems breathing, and was staying at the South Essex Wildlife Hospital in the hope he’d recover – and he’d started to make good progress.
As he’s non-native and shouldn’t have been in the wild in the first place, it wasn’t clear whether he’d ever be able to return to the area he’d have known as ‘home’, but sadly that’s no longer a question. The vet performed a post-mortem and he had a hard/diseased liver and gall bladder, which looks like the result of a condition he’d had for some time.
Bob gets mentioned in Wikipedia – but clearly many people think he’s theirs.
A GoFundMe raised over £1500 to cover the costs of his treatment at South Essex Wildlife Hospital – donations in his memory would, I’m sure, continue to be welcome.
I first saw BOB in my garden in Park Road in 2007 so he has been around Aldersbrook for a very long time. We will miss the flash of red from his wings as he flies off.