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Dude, the grey heron, needed flying lessons and there was no one else to teach him.

When Dude, the grey heron, fell from his nest, he was so small that he would have sat quite comfortably in the palm of a man’s hand.

The fledgling heron was taken to a wildlife reserve in Cornwall, England, and hand reared by manager, Gary Zammit. Dude is now three months old and has a four foot wing span but experts feared that he would never get off the ground, because herons need to be taught by their parents to fly.

During the past three months Gary has hand fed the bird and learned how to make the correct sounds to give him confidence. So, he decided that he would try to teach Dude to fly.

The two of them ran down the road with Gary flapping his arms and making ‘heron noises’ as Dude ran with him and copied him by flapping his wings. They did this a few times before Dude suddenly became airborne and got the idea that he could fly.

Dude soars up to a height of seventy feet now and still comes back to Gary. This caused some concern at first because it was feared that Dude might fly away and he might not be able to fend for himself in the wild.

However, he has a comfortable place to live and plenty of fish at the wildlife sanctuary, whenever he wants them and so he always comes home, and there is little chance of him flying away.