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 A grandad whose dog discovered an abandoned baby in a Birmingham park spoke about the amazing pet rescue and said: “We were just in the right place at the right time.” 
 
 Roger Wilday, 68, was walking German Shepherd Jade in Stechford when she inexplicably raced to bushes, then lay down next to what looked like a discarded carrier bag – and refused to return to him. 
 
 As the pensioner moved closer he realised what the loyal family pet had discovered: a newborn baby, who has now been named after her four-legged rescuer. 
 
 Roger said: ‘‘I walked over and saw a carrier bag – then I saw it move. I thought it was a bag of kittens, but then I saw her little arms and a head, and the baby started to cry.’’ 
 
 Here's the first video released of baby Jade 
 
 The dramatic discovery took place in Marlborough House Community Park on Thursday afternoon. 
 
 Dad-of-four Roger raced to a friend’s nearby house and dialled 999, then rushed back to pick up the infant. 
 
 He said: “I thought I’m not going to touch anything because if I start messing and they come for forensics... I just didn’t want to hinder their job. 
 
 "The police told me they were on their way and asked me to pick her up and take her out of the park.’’ 
 
 Moments later seven police cars and an ambulance arrived at the scene, off Stuart’s Road. 
 
 Roger, from Yardley, said: “They took the baby off me and put her straight into the ambulance. I then had to show police officers where I found her.’’ 
 
 The little girl was taken to Heartlands Hospital where staff named her after hero pet Jade. 
 
 Here's a later video showing more of her time in hospital 
 
 On Friday pictures and video were released of the six-pound baby , who was said to be “alert, happy and contented” as she continues to recover. 
 
 Faithful nine-year-old Jade is now receiving extra special fuss from Roger and wife Catherine, who have five grandkids, including Eliza, who was born just over two weeks ago. 
 
 Catherine, 65, said: “Jade’s never found anything before. She must have heard the baby crying as these dogs have very good hearing, plus she’s very keen on our grandchildren. 
 
 "Whenever she hears their names she whimpers. She just loves kids.’’ 
 
 She added: “I’m really pleased that the nurses named the baby after Jade, it makes me so proud of her. 
 
 ‘‘It’s not a typical thing to find a baby, but that’s just the kind of thing that would happen to Roger. He’s that type of person. He cares about everyone.” 
 
 Jade is being monitored around the clock by paediatricians while police continue the search for her mother. 
 
 Roger and his wife are also hoping for a future reunion with the little girl. ‘‘We are waiting to hear from police if we can see her,’’ he said. 
 
 Chief Inspector Ian Green, of West Midlands Police, said the consequences of Jade not discovering the baby could have been serious. 
 
 “The baby was lucky to be found when she was as even just a few more hours exposed to the elements could have had fatal consequences,’’ he said. 
 
 “Thankfully, we now know she’s safe and well – and our priority is very much on finding her mum to ensure her safety. 
 
 "We’re still keen to hear from witnesses – especially anyone who saw somebody with a carrier bag from The Entertainer toy shop – or anyone who could have information that will lead us to identify the mother.” 
 
 Anyone with information is urged to call police on 101. 
 
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 These are the first heartbreaking pictures of a newborn baby who was found abandoned in a park. 
 
 The healthy tot - who is barely a few days old - was discovered by dog-walker Roger Wilday wrapped in a towel in a plastic carrier bag by his German Shepherd on Thursday afternoon. 
 
 Hospital staff have named the baby in honour of Jade - the dog who may well have saved her life. 
 
 Medics say Jade - who weighs six pounds - is "alert, happy and contented" as she continues her recovery. 
 
 West Midlands Police have released a picture of the baby and say they urgently want to reunite her with her mother. 
 
 Baby Jade was discovered by Mr Wilday at around 3pm on Thursday in Stechford Park, the West Midlands. 
 
 Mr Wilday, 68, said of his dog: "She headed to the bushes. She wouldn't come back so I had to go over and I saw the bag and then I heard a baby cry. 
 
 "I reached down to look at the bag closer and I saw a baby in a blue blanket, I was so shocked. 
 
 "I dialled 999 and picked the baby up. She was warm so I don't think she had been there long." 
 
 He added: "Jade has grown up with children around her, she loves babies, she's a hero, if it wasn't for her that baby could have died." 
 
 Chief Inspector Ian Green, said: "It is fantastic news that baby Jade is recovering well in hospital - I’m told she’s very alert and a contented happy baby. 
 
 "She’s doing well and should make a full recovery over the next couple of days – but of course what she really needs is to be in her mother’s arms. 
 
 "I’d urge Jade’s mum to make contact with us on the 101 police number so we can reunite them and get her medical attention and emotional support." 
 
 Officers are continuing the search today for the baby’s mother. 
 
 Extensive house-to-house enquiries have been carried out around the park and checks made with regional hospitals, medical centres and care homes. 
 
 The towel baby jade was wrapped in, along with the carrier bag, have been sent away for fast-track forensics whilst it’s hoped DNA samples taken from the tot will help identify her parents. 
 
 Chief Insp Green, added: "Paediatricians have confirmed the baby was lucky to be found when she was as even just a few more hours exposed to the elements could have had fatal consequences. 
 
 "Thankfully, we now know she’s safe and well – and our priority is very much on finding her mum to ensure her safety and to provide whatever support she needs. 
 
 "We’re still keen to hear from witnesses who were in the park yesterday – especially anyone who saw somebody with a carrier bag from The Entertainer toy shop – or anyone who believes they could have information that will lead us to identify the mother." ||||| Celeste and Morné Nurse describe reuniting with their daughter who was stolen from them at birth 18 years ago. The kidnapper was arrested and has pleaded not guilty. (ENCA) 
 
 Celeste Nurse simply thought the woman was trying to help. 
 
 Nurse lay in a Cape Town, South Africa, hospital bed, groggy from the morphine masking the pain from her cesarean section three days earlier. In a cot next to her lay her newborn, a bushy haired girl. In her medicated haze, Celeste spotted a woman sitting near the maternity ward door. 
 
 “Your baby is crying,” said the woman, who was dressed like a nurse in a beige top and maroon pants. “Can I pick up the child?” 
 
 Celeste assented, watching the woman scoop up the child, Zephany, before she fell back asleep. 
 
 When Celeste awoke again, it was because another nurse — a real nurse — was frantically shaking her. 
 
 “Where is your child?” the nurse asked urgently. 
 
 “What do you mean?” Celeste answered in confusion. “The nurse was just here with the baby.” 
 
 Horror suddenly sharpened Celeste’s cloudy mind. She tore the IV from her arm and, despite her fresh surgical wound, began running around the hospital’s halls, desperately searching for her missing baby. 
 
 But Zephany, which means “the Lord has hidden” in Hebrew, was nowhere to be found. 
 
 She would remain lost for almost 18 years. 
 
 “I thought that someone needed to wake me up because this was not happening to me,” Celeste said Tuesday, nearly 19 years after her nightmare began. “I thought that it cannot be true.” 
 
 But it was true. And on Tuesday, Nurse came face to face with the person who prosecutors say is responsible. The woman who allegedly stole Celeste’s baby and raised Zephany as her own is now on trial. 
 
 It is an incredible crime, made even more remarkable by its unbelievable climax. 
 
 For almost two decades, the bizarre story of the vanishing baby with the biblical name has made headlines in South Africa. Although the country has been plagued by similar crimes, Zephany’s disappearance was special. 
 
 Her fate seemed written into her very name. 
 
 A biblical name, a bewitching case 
 
 Celeste and Morné Nurse both grew up in the predominantly nonwhite township of Mitchells Plain, outside the scenic city of Cape Town. He was powerfully built. She was pretty and whisper thin. They met as teenagers, and within a year, they were married and expecting their first child, a daughter they decided to name Zephany. Soon, the young parents-to-be got over their shock. 
 
 “It was all very exciting,” Celeste Nurse told the Cape Argus newspaper three years ago. “We always wondered what she’d be like.” 
 
 Zephany was born healthy and with a full head of hair on April 27, 1997. 
 
 Three days later, Celeste was shaken awake to find that her daughter was gone — taken by a woman posing as a nurse. All that was left were a few traces of the child: Zephany’s clothes, a handbag with no hint about its owner and a pillow — allegedly used by the thief to fake a pregnancy — abandoned in a disused tunnel leading from the maternity ward to the outside world, according to the Cape Argus. 
 
 “We ran everywhere in the hospital,” Celeste said on the witness stand Tuesday. “The baby was nowhere to be found. Missing. Gone.” 
 
 The young couple was distraught. 
 
 “I was crying my heart out in the fetal position,” Morne testified Tuesday. 
 
 The hospital called the police, but they didn’t turn up any more clues. When the parents learned that there was no security at the hospital and no leads on their daughter’s whereabouts, their terror turned into anger. 
 
 “I went ballistic,” Morne told the Cape Argus in 2010. “I even knocked over a medicine cabinet and all the bottles broke on the floor.” 
 
 “We came home to nothing,” Celeste said in the same interview. 
 
 For days, the couple clung to the hope that the nightmare would somehow end and their baby girl would be returned to them. Their grief was amplified by the baby gear in their house. Everything reminded them of their Zephany. 
 
 
 
 Celeste Nurse, right, reports to a Cape Town court to testify about the day her newborn daughter was stolen. (Schalk van Zuydam/AP) 
 
 “At night I lay in bed and heard the cats crying,” Celeste said. “Sometimes they sounded just like a baby.” 
 
 Several leads emerged, only to unravel. Shortly before Zephany disappeared, another mother had caught a woman holding her baby and walking toward the hospital exit. When the mother confronted the woman, she handed the baby back and said she was just trying to “soothe” the child. But the mother couldn’t identify the woman. 
 
 When one of the Nurses’ neighbors suddenly showed up with a newborn, despite having never appeared pregnant, police investigated. But the baby turned out to be a boy. 
 
 It would be the last lead for more than a decade. 
 
 The Nurses had three more kids — including a daughter named Cassidy — but never forgot their missing firstborn. They celebrated Zephany’s birthday every year, often making public appeals in newspapers or on television begging the kidnapper to return the girl. 
 
 Then, at 3 a.m. on July 17, 2009, the Nurses received a phone call that revived their hopes. 
 
 “I know about your daughter,” the female caller said in a hushed tone, according to the Cape Argus. Then she demanded 500,000 rand (about $33,000) for information on the girl’s location. She told the family to bring the cash to a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant in Mitchells Plain. 
 
 The Nurses called the police, and seven hours later, Morné showed up at the fast-food joint wearing a wire. But the caller never showed. Instead, police traced the calls to a woman who lived near Celeste’s mother and arrested her for attempted extortion. 
 
 “I’ll never ever give up hope,” Morné told the newspaper in 2010. “I can feel it in my gut — my daughter is out there and she is going to come home.” 
 
 Zephany was still being hidden. But the girl didn’t even know it. 
 
 An unbelievable breakthrough 
 
 Everyone kept telling Cassidy Nurse about her doppelganger. Cassidy was a first-year student at her Mitchell Plains high school, but one student after another told her she bore an uncanny resemblance to a senior. They had the same light-brown skin, almond-shaped eyes, broad nose and ample lips. 
 
 Cassidy felt strangely drawn to the older girl, and they became friends. When she told her parents about the supposed similarity, her father became intrigued. Morné arranged to meet the older girl at a local McDonald’s. 
 
 “We went to McDonald’s and I started questioning her,” Morné told the court Tuesday, according to the Daily Mail. “I asked what her date of birth was — her birthday was the date my daughter was abducted. 
 
 “She said she didn’t look like her own folks, and she told me that she had thought about that over and over,” he continued. “I asked her why she thought she looked like me and Cassidy. She laughed and said she didn’t know, she said she felt confused. I didn’t want to scare her. I wanted to protect her at all costs. I left with the information I was looking for. I went onto Facebook and got more information on this girl, I scrutinised her account. I saw pictures of her and she resembled my kids completely.” 
 
 Then he pulled a photo of the girl’s supposed mother from Facebook and sent it to someone. 
 
 The person, Shireen Piet, said she recognized the woman. She said it was the same woman who she had caught “soothing” her baby shortly before Zephany was stolen in April 1997. 
 
 Morné didn’t tell Celeste at first. He didn’t want to break her heart for a second time. 
 
 Also, the pair had split up a year before. Celeste had battled cancer and won. She also had also met another man to whom she would soon get engaged. But she and Morné remained united in their passion to find their firstborn. 
 
 Eventually, Morné sent Celeste a photo of the girl. 
 
 “I just — I got that feeling inside, I just grabbed my heart and said this is my daughter,” Celeste told CBS. “This is my daughter.” 
 
 Once Morné felt he had the evidence he needed, he took it to the authorities. Police took DNA samples from the girl. And after six excruciating weeks of testing, the results came back in late February of 2015. 
 
 Finally, Zephany had been found. 
 
 She had a different name, but she had grown up barely a mile from her biological family. 
 
 Celeste finally met her daughter on Feb. 26, 2015. 
 
 “I burst out into tears when I saw her,” Celeste told CBS. “And she kept me like this, in her arms the first time when she saw her dad, and when she came to me I just — I couldn’t stop crying. I couldn’t stop crying. I said, finally, I found you. For 17 years I’ve been looking for you. 
 
 “I found you finally. You’re mine again.” 
 
 One mother’s relief, another’s arrest 
 
 A day after Celeste was reunited with her daughter, the woman allegedly responsible for the 18-year rift was arrested. The woman, a 51-year-old seamstress, has not been named because of South African law. She has been charged with kidnapping and fraud for filing false paperwork regarding her daughter’s birth and identity. 
 
 Zephany’s adopted name also as been protected by court order. 
 
 The trial began Monday in Western Cape High Court. 
 
 The woman has pleaded not guilty. In a 35-page document explaining her plea, she painted herself as an unwitting victim of a shady middle-woman. 
 
 The accused said she had been abused and raped as a child, and beaten by boyfriends so severely that she suffered a series of miscarriages. She had even lost a six-week-old daughter, she claimed. When she suffered another miscarriage in 1997, she hid the news from her husband. Instead of telling him, she secretly arranged to adopt a newborn, she wrote. 
 
 She met the middle-woman at a bus station in Cape Town and was handed an infant wrapped in a blanket, she wrote. She then told her husband, family and friends that the dark-haired girl was her own. 
 
 “I had on occasions thought about telling Michael and Zephany about the adoption but they had a very close relationship and did not want to destroy it,” she wrote in an apparent reference to her husband. 
 
 She said she had trouble loving the child. 
 
 “I initially struggled to be close to her,” she wrote, according to the Daily Mail. “It took me years to accept her as my own daughter. 
 
 “Although I was not her biological mother, I raised her as my own child. I recall sitting with her, brushing her hair, bathing her and always wondering where her parents were and why they did not want her as I found her to be pretty and cute,” she continued. “I thought I was helping a child who was not wanted and would not be cared for sufficiently by her biological parents.” 
 
 In fact, the child was very much on the minds of her biological parents. And it’s unclear if there really was a middle-woman. 
 
 “She [the middle-woman] told me that the baby’s mother is a young girl who wanted to give her child up for adoption. … I was told that the baby was mine and the documentation will be sorted out later,” the accused wrote in her plea. “I had a bad feeling that something was wrong.” 
 
 Incredibly, Celeste has said she is prepared to forgive the woman — even if the legal system cannot. 
 
 “When I see the woman that took her, I would like to give her a hug,” she said last March, after the woman had been released on bail. “When I see her I want to say thank you for what you’ve done. You’ve done a good job, look at my daughter, she’s beautiful inside out.” 
 
 On Tuesday, the two mothers — one accused of kidnapping the other’s child — shared a strange but tender moment during the trial. 
 
 Celeste told the court how she had given Zephany her first bath in the hospital, marveling at her tuft of dark hair. 
 
 “She looked like Simba the lion from ‘The Lion King,'” Celeste said, drawing a smile from the woman accused of kidnapping her child. “She was so cute.”
– A 68-year-old British man was walking his dog in a Birmingham park last week when the German shepherd suddenly ran over to the bushes and refused to return. Owner Roger Wilday walked over to find her lying down next to what looked like trash ... but as he got closer, he realized it was actually a newborn infant. "I saw it move," Wilday tells the Birmingham Mail. "I thought it was a bag of kittens, but then I saw her little arms and a head, and the baby started to cry." The six-pound baby girl was brought to the hospital and named Jade, after the dog. She's "alert, happy, and contented" while recovering, and police are looking for her mother. Canine Jade "must have heard the baby crying as these dogs have very good hearing, plus she’s very keen on our grandchildren," Wilday says. "Whenever she hears their names she whimpers. She just loves kids." He and his wife are hoping they'll be allowed to see the little girl, who, police say, could have died had she been left outside even a few more hours. She was just a few days old when found, the Mirror notes.