Who is scratching at my ceiling?

The other day Grace and I came home from Aqua Zumba and after my shower Grace said she could hear scratching but wan't sure where it was coming form.  I stood beside her and sure enough there was a scratching noise coming from the ceiling - the attic.  This got me concerned that maybe we had a mouse or worse ... rats.

Well I didn't think there was much I could do so I went out to the workshop and did some work on the online shop and thought when Brad got home he could take care of it.

When I came in for lunch I decided to face the 'rat' or 'mouse'.  But when I opened the attic door and climbed half way up the stairs I could hear a baby bird peeping.

Sure enough at the far end of the house sitting on the top of the pink bats was a little sparrow fledgling.  Grace and I carefully stepped on the beams and Grace was able to get the little sparrow into an empty Weet-bix box.  The we saw the other fledgling, but it was dead.

Once out of the attic and into the kitchen I made some mush with Weet-bix, water and a tiny bit of honey.  I used a toothpick and carefully fed the little sparrow.

It turned out that the night before Brad and Melissa could hear the peeping of a bird that sounded like it was in the house (because little did we know that it was).  We do have a family of sparrows in the corner of the house under the gutter area.  So it looks like this little sparrow was from the family and had hopped out of the nest and up under the roof on the building paper where if fell through into our attic.  But seeing has it did not have very strong wings yet it could not get back up to its nest.

When Brad did get home we managed to get the dustpan under the building paper and sent it back towards its nest.  Since then it parents outside seem to be calling more and it sounds like more than one baby responding back in the nest, so hopefully it made it back to Mum and Dad (who we have nick-named Jack and Jackie)