A very welcome slow week

After the previous week’s debacle, I won’t complain too much about this past week being slower than is the norm for baby season. Actually, I suspect I’ve experienced the “mid-season lull”, when the first massive wave of nestlings has fledged and new nests are being built/eggs being laid to begin the second onslaught. April was a heavier than usual month, and although May seemed slow to me, it equaled April in intakes, so…who knows? It’s been a weird year from the get-go; why should it suddenly become normal now, right?

The blue jay’s joint and toe remain slightly swollen but he is starting to flex the toe a bit and put weight on the foot. The general consensus seems to be that this is some sort of nest injury that was aggravated when he started trying to put weight on it initially.

Meanwhile, he is—as most blue jays are—a shameless little beggar who thus far refuses to eat anything on his own. I’ve even hand-fed him bits of blueberry, usually a blue jay treat, which he eagerly snaps into his beak…and then carefully spits back out. This isn’t the usual food caching that blue jays will do, however, as he doesn’t bother to hide it—just spits it out and looks at me expectantly, waiting for the “good stuff.” He also likes to sling the “good stuff”, so his little face gets swabbed down every couple of feedings to prevent food build-up.

Below are a couple of neat shots of his gaping beak (pre-swabbing; he ain’t gonna gape after being fed and swabbed down). See the spiky cleft at the back of the roof of his mouth? That’s his choana, which is actually connected to his nares, or his nostrils, on the outside of his beak. When his beak is closed, the choana makes a seal with the glottis, the hole in his tongue, so that air goes directly from the nose to the lungs, rather than into the mouth and then the lungs like our breath does.  Neat, huh? 

The flyer is in pre-release caging now and I don’t see her often; she will occasionally stick her head out of the nest box in the late afternoon for a pecan treat, take it from me, and sink back down into the box.

The screech is self-feeding…sort of. He still can’t handle an entire mouse, even if it’s slit open, but he can eagerly chow down on bite-sized chunks of mouse.  As soon as he can eat an entire mouse without it having to be cut up or open for him, he’ll be moved to the flight pen—with his size, he’ll do fine in the songbird flight (with no songbirds in it, of course, folks—I mean, really!).

This Canada gosling was found on the sidewalk in a neighboring town, unable to walk properly. He had a large scabbed-over scrape on his left side, and x-rays revealed a fracture too close to the hip to be fixed. The x-ray machine wasn’t cooperating on providing a copy of the x-ray; all it would transfer to either flash drive or CD was a postage-stamp size thumbnail in which you couldn’t even see the individual bones, much less a fracture. And I didn’t think to snap a photo with the camera, as we had another bird to deal with. We had to euthanize the gosling.

That other bird was a juvenile barred owl that one of Smalley’s Animal Hospital’s clients brought in after they told her I was on the premises that morning. Her son had found him in the middle of the road late the previous night and placed him in a pet crate. The rescuer’s mother then sought care for him early the next morning. Upon arrival at the clinic, his left eye was swollen shut and there was blood on his face from his left ear. He was also very thin.

An exam by vet Jim Hobby revealed that the eye was just bruised and that the blood was from a cut to the ear, not actual bleeding from the ear, which would have signaled a more serious head injury.  These were his only injuries. Jim suggested anti-inflammatory eye drops for a couple of days.

By the next day, the swelling had gone down considerably. The greenish fluid you see is his eye drops; I had just medicated him when I snapped these photos.

By the third day, there was only a slight residual swelling! He’ll remain with me for a few days longer, though, to get some weight back on his skinny little body.

When the call came in that people moving pine straw from under a pole barn had found a nest of barn owls, I pleaded with them to leave the birds where they were and give the parents time to finish raising them. They had already destroyed the nest site by the time they called me, however, and so I ended up with three half-grown barnies.

For those who’re unfamiliar with barnies, they’re…umm…unique in the owl world for their vocalizations. They sound like a woman being murdered. One wit has said they sound like all the banshees in hell have been let loose. When these three cut loose as I was moving them from the dog crate they’d been brought to me in, it was loud but not too horrible; after all, we were outside, so there was somewhere for the sound to go.

Inside, however…oh, inside…How best to describe a barnie’s shriek in an enclosed space? It resonates through your entire body. You feel it down to the soles of your feet. Your brain rattles around in your skull, demanding that the ungodly din cease immediately. You feel the need to check your ears for bleeding from ruptured ear drums…It’s deafeningly, ear-piercingly, painfully loud, in other words.

And these three occasionally cut loose en masse. Oh. My. God. You have no idea…banshees from hell is a pretty apt description, come to think of it…

The video clips below feature only the warning hisses and mild shrieks warning of things to come if I didn’t go away. I was afraid the full-on shrieks would cause the camcorder to self-destruct…

The barnies, along with the red shouldered hawk—who finally decided to eat on his own; hallelujah!—are with Bubba & Friends Raptor Rehab now. Steve has a juvie red shoulder about the same age as my guy, and he has more experience dealing with barnies, who are highly prone to stress out. God help his ears…