Last week was a slow week as far as intakes; however, it was an insane week for editing…which is why a slow week for intakes probably helped preserve what little sanity I have left!

This rather small adult male barred owl was actually the only intake for the week. He was found near a light pole, so the finder’s initial assumption was that he might have hit the wires. He didn’t see any injuries but the owl was quite docile when he moved it to safety, worried that free-roaming dogs might kill it.

When the finder called me, his description of the owl meshed with “normal” behavior for a concussed bird: docile, quiet—just out of it. The fact that he couldn’t see any injuries encouraged me: maybe we had a bird here who could be released after a few days at the LWR B&B.

When he brought me the bird, however, all sorts of alarms began going off in my mind as he further described its behavior…The owl was never aggressive with him, not even a warning beak click. When he, after talking with me, safely confined the bird for the night, until we could meet the next day, he was startled to discover it would sit on his gloved hand and rouse (ruffle its feathers) quite comfortably.

All this, along with a reasonably well-fleshed bird with less than well-developed flight muscles and slightly overgrown talons made me highly suspicious that we had a bird someone had held illegally and then dumped to fend for itself when a) the novelty wore off; b) they were warned that possession of wildlife without a permit is illegal; and/or c) he bit or footed someone.

The finder was not happy at my hazarded guess as to the reason(s) for the bird’s grounding, and I cautioned him that I could still be wrong. Concussed birds can seem extremely tame, and mild thinness can sometimes be confused with underdeveloped flight muscles. I wouldn’t know for certain until I had the bird somewhere other than a parking lot, so I could examine him more thoroughly.

When I got him home, the first thing I did was to check his eyes with a penlight. To my dismay, both eyes were cloudy, the left more so than the right. Not bloody or “soft” or misshapen looking—all signs of a massive blow to the head. No, this was the cloudiness that usually signifies blindness…When I put him back in the box on a perch and tapped on the box and waved my hand in front of his face, he didn’t turn to follow the sound or movement with his head. He stared blankly upward. There seemed to be hearing loss or damage, as well.

We were still less than 48 hours out from when he was found, so all of this could still be related to a concussion. But then I put on a glove again and put my hand behind the owl…who stepped back onto my hand. He didn’t sit like a properly trained bird; he spread his feet across the palm of my hand. He allowed me to pull him right up against my chest…without trying to give me a free mastectomy, which is normally SOP for even concussed barred owls.

And he refused the whole rat I offered him but readily ate the chopped-up rat I hand-fed him…albeit with some degree of difficulty, as if he was unfamiliar with the texture. Hmmm…

So...is the owl the victim of a run-in with a vehicle? Was he kept illegally and fed a crap diet that resulted in blindness and possibly other health issues? Is there something else entirely going on? Will he be releasable or is he truly blind and possibly deaf? I honestly don’t know at this point. I’ll give him more time to see what happens, but I’m not nearly as optimistic as I was only a day ago.

An owl with one good eye can be released, as they hunt primarily by hearing. An owl who is deaf cannot be released, and obviously a totally blind or severely vision-impaired owl isn’t a candidate for release. Furthermore, such an owl is not a candidate for an educational bird. Why? Stop and think about it from the bird’s POV, if you will: you can’t see or hear anything; you can’t feed yourself; you’re trapped in a world of—for an owl—near-total sensory deprivation. This isn’t living; it’s barely existing.

And if this was caused by some idiot keeping him illegally and feeding him the wrong foods, then I sincerely hope they’re repaid in full for their jackassery. (And I’d dearly like to be the instrument of that repayment.)

The Coop rescue that “headlined” last Sunday’s update was one of those rare instances where a raptor versus vehicle encounter ended well for the raptor, and I was delighted to detail her rescue and treatment—and very optimistic about her chances for release. However…in one of those heartbreaking turns of events all too common in wildlife rehab, the Coop died during the week. Accipiters are notoriously stressy birds, so the general tendency is to get ‘em in and get ‘em out as quickly as possible. Given her sutured elbow, though, she needed extra time and medication before release…time enough, apparently, to stress out and keel over.

She was fine at lights-out and dead the next morning, and immediately the rehabber litany of self-blame began. What did I miss? What didn’t I do that I should have done? What did I do that I shouldn’t have done? Every rehabber who loses an animal is familiar with the drill, as we go through it Every. Single. Time. one of our rehabs dies in our care…

Here’s my checklist for this deceased Coop:

·        Eating well? Check

·        Poop normal? Check

·        Casting pellets? Check

·        Pellets normal? Check

·        Alert and active? Check and check

·        Sutures in place? Check

·        Still on meds? Check

·        No signs of infection? Nope

·        No signs of frounce or capillaria? Nope

Add to this that a vet exam showed no injuries aside from the elbow gash that we sutured, and you come up with a big fat “WHY?”  I have no clue, aside from the fact that Coops are accipiters, and as such, psychotic. It’s like they sit there and decide, “I’ll show you. If you won’t release me to rip my wing open and die from infection, I’ll just drop dead in my crate overnight, anyway—that’ll teach ya.”

In less depressing news, despite the threat (and in most of the state, the reality) of bad weather last week, we only got rain, so as soon as it stopped I was able to release both the pigeon and the killdeer by just leaving the flight pen door open for them to leave when they chose to. As you may recall, I refused to put them in the pen together, so the day the pigeon left, the killdeer went in. The pigeon hung around for a few post-release photos; the killdeer did not. Before moving him into the flight pen, though, I did snap updated photos of his injured eye versus his uninjured eye. He wasn’t totally blind in the injured eye, which was excellent news.

The flyers are growing apace and now eating the solid foods I’ve been offering them for two weeks. About the middle of last week it suddenly dawned on them that the solid foods they’d been previously peeing all over at night, giving me a lovely, soggy mess to clean up every morning, weren’t actually toilets. Now they’re happily nibbling away on their goodies—as long as I’m not watching. Within another week or so, they’ll need a larger cage, too.

And while the weather in my neck of the woods was tolerable last week, north of us was hit pretty hard by more snow and ice, meaning that the downy GHO didn’t make it to Bubba & Friends, after all. We’re aiming at a transfer this week, as no snow or ice is predicted. Meanwhile, the little rascal has noticeably grown in just a week, and I swear, if you stand next to his “nest” box very quietly, you can hear him growing! He no longer inhales small mice; now it’s most of a whole rat at every feeding!

When the call came in last week that a hawk was trapped in a truck grille, my heart sank. Truck grilles and hawks are NOT a good combination.  The truck owner, Andy Johnson (and you know I don’t normally list people’s names, but given the nature of this situation, I asked permission to do so), said the hawk came out of nowhere, flying low the ground, and he didn’t have time to stop or swerve. He saw an explosion of feathers and figured the bird was dead, so he drove the few remaining miles to his home, where he planned to extricate the carcass from his grille.

To his surprise, however, the hawk was still alive. After attempting to remove the bird, with no luck, he had his wife Serena post a photo of the trapped bird on Facebook, where a mutual friend saw it and tagged me. I contacted Serena, and she put Andy on the phone. At this point, I was still banking on a fatally injured bird but agreed to meet them if he could drive slowly to our designated meeting spot—there was a barrier between the hawk and the motor, so our main concern was stress on the bird as he drove.

I arrived a couple of minutes before he did, in a gas station parking lot on the north side of Dublin, and noticed a police car also in the lot. This was good from my point of view! Shortly afterward, Andy pulled up and showed me the trapped hawk using his flashlight. We needed more light to try and free the bird, so I walked over to the police car and asked the officer, Lt. Russell Brooks, if he had a spotlight. He had one mounted on his side view mirror and drove over to where we were parked to provide us sufficient light to see what we were doing.

As Andy removed the panel keeping the bird away from the motor, Lt. Brooks got out to see if he could help. Within a few minutes another officer, Sgt. Neal Clark, drove up to see what was going on. As Lt. Brooks explained the situation, Sgt. Clark got out and asked if I had an extra pair of gloves. As luck would have it, I always keep two pair in the car, so he donned a pair, I donned a pair, and while I pushed the hawk from the bottom of the grille, he pulled from the top. Within 15 minutes we’d managed to work the bird free.

At that point, I examined her—and her feet indicated female; her markings indicated Cooper’s hawk—and saw that her right wing was bloody. There was a huge chunk of bloody flesh exposed. Not good. Andy, Lt. Brooks and Sgt. Clark left thinking that all their efforts had been in vain.

However…

On the way home, I started thinking about that chunk of flesh. I hadn’t seen any bones sticking out. Parking lot exams are, after all, cursory at best.  Maybe a more thorough exam once I got home would show less damage than I initially thought.  And it did! The skin had been ripped away from the elbow, but nothing was actually broken as far as I could tell!

After cleaning and medicating the wing, which I now was certain could be repaired with a few well-placed sutures, I called Andy and Serena and the 911 communications desk to let all those involved in the Coop’s rescue know that she actually had a very good chance of survival.

The next morning, I took Miss Coop to Smalley’s Animal Hospital, where vet Peggy Hobby was as amazed as I was that she had survived crashing into a grille with only what amounted to a flesh wound. She again cleaned the wound and put in four sutures, leaving space for drainage should any slight infection set in—and even with antibiotics, there is often slight pus discharge from wounds.

Coops, as some of you may remember, are accipiters. This means they fall into the manic category of birds. They’re aggressive; they’re spastic—they’re hell on wings to deal with, in short. After we got back from the clinic, Miss Coop proceeded in short order to escape from her box FOUR times in as many hours. She was flailing that wing around wildly. She even managed to fly a short distance in the enclosed space of the “rehab” bathroom. In short, she did everything stupid that should have torn those stitches loose. As a testament to Peggy’s skill, the sutures remained in place (and yes, I called the next day to let her know just how good her sutures were!).

So now we wait for the wound to heal sufficiently to release Miss Coop—and I want to thank all the folks named above for their assistance in getting this lady to me so she could get the help she needs.

This barred owl was found by the side of the road and was also lucky in that nothing was broken and there is no eye damage. He just had a major headache. I’d hoped to have him back out where he belonged by the weekend, but he was slow to recover from his concussion, so the plan now is to get him back into his territory tomorrow.

You may think it’s too early for baby raptors. You would be wrong. Great horned owls (GHOs) go on the nest around here in the dead of winter, so the babies start coming in fairly early. This week LWR received its first downy GHO of the season. The little guy was found in the woods with no parents in sight and was ravenous when I got him…which isn’t unusual for GHOs, who are renowned for their appetites, but it would indicate that his parents hadn’t been around to feed him.  Because Steve Hicks of Bubba & Friends has adult GHOs for this little guy to learn all about being an owl from, he’s headed that way this week. 

The killdeer’s eye looks much better and as soon as I can get the pigeon out of the flight pen, I’ll put the killdeer in for a few days, to make sure he’s good to go. (Pigeons can be aggressive to smaller birds, so I never put pigeons and other birds together.)

And we narrowly averted a tragedy with the latest three flyers. Yesterday morning, all three were alert and active. By noon, the runt of the litter was lethargic, listless and limp, his eyes dull. When I listened to his lungs, I could hear the crackles that indicate pneumonia, so I started him on antibiotics. By nightfall, he couldn’t even keep his eyes open and barely ate. I medicated again and really expected to find him dead this morning. Instead, he was again bright-eyed, alert and active.

This is one of the reasons I stress that people need to get wildlife to me or another rehabber ASAP. Had this little guy been with someone who had no idea what was going on or without the meds to begin treatment immediately, he WOULD be dead right now. With baby season right around the corner, it’s not too early to remind you not to take chances with the precious little lives of orphaned wildlife—get those babies to a properly licensed rehabber as soon as humanly possible.

In keeping with the theory that Nature abhors a vacuum, hot on the heels of this week’s releases came intakes. That’s par for the course in wildlife rehab, where even the “slow” season usually isn’t, except in relation to the chaos that’s baby bird season.

Our habituated turkey vulture, after a week of what can loosely be termed confinement (I say loosely because the smart not-so-little snot quickly figured out he could tear out of his box and proceeded to do so…daily…sometimes twice daily…), decided he really didn’t like humans that much after all, and hesitated not a bit when offered the chance to leave the LWR B&B.

The great blue heron who’d been tangled in fishing cord and had his wing hooked was also ready to go. At one point both birds got out of their respective boxes at the same time and since they were housed in the same room, that made for an interesting “dance.” Add to the mix one increasingly irritated rehabber trying to “re-confine” said birds, and you get Three Stooges-level insanity. Sorry, there’s no video of that. By the time the two of them had finished trashing the place, the resultant destruction would have made a rock star misty-eyed with pride. I still don’t have it fully restored to any semblance of order.

At any rate, the heron was happy to see freedom, too. Just once I’d like to release a heron or a loon or a coot and see it fly away—just once. But they always either swim or walk away—in the case of herons, it’s always walking. Makes sense, if you stop and think about it: they are long-legged wading birds, after all. But I’d still like for just one to fly away at his release…

Also last week, we had a HBC killdeer come in. I have no shame in admitting that I didn’t realize killdeer were year-round residents in Georgia. We hear and see them all spring and summer, but I can’t ever recall seeing or hearing them in the fall or winter, so I just presumed they were migratory. Nope. They’re here year-round.

At any rate, the young woman whose grille this killdeer flew into was distraught when she hit him. She called me immediately, and I honestly expected to pick up a bird who’d need euthanizing due to a massively shattered wing, leg, or both. To my pleasant surprise, the killdeer had only a trashed eye and a bad headache. I mean, it’s still going to take some recovery time for him to adjust to flight and searching for food with one good eye, but it’s better than a leg or wing fracture.

For those of you who live near the shore and are wondering, yes, killdeer are in the plover family but despite being technically classified as waterfowl, they actually spend very little time near water. Go figure…

Anyway, this guy’s got a while yet before release. He’s eating well and has learned to throw a tantrum to alert me when his mealworms run out, so he’s considerably less stressed than a young killdeer would be.  Baby killdeer don’t fare well, as a rule, in rehab.

This young sharp-shinned hawk was found by the side of the road on a nasty, misty, damp day. When I met his rescuers, it was immediately apparent that there was nothing to be done for him but to euthanize. His left foot was trashed beyond any hope of repair, and he was so weak from starvation and blood loss that he didn’t even put up the usual accipiter struggle.

I have no idea what caused the injury. He could have been clipped by a side-view mirror on a vehicle. Given his emaciated state, he might have been desperate enough to try to catch a squirrel—hope outrunning reason, when the squirrel would be almost as big as the bird. Sharpies are actually pretty small raptors. He might even have been shot, although a detailed examination after he was euthanized led me to eliminate that as a truly viable possibility.

For what it’s worth, I don’t post these graphic pictures for their shock value. I post them so that people have a real grasp of what’s involved in wildlife rehab. The public seems to have this “Disneyfied” notion that rehabbers sit around and play with Nature’s creatures and release them all to live long, happy lives. I call it the warm’n’fuzzy, cute’n’cuddly mentality. Oh, if only…As I’ve mentioned here repeatedly, nationwide an average of 50% of the wildlife brought to rehabbers won’t survive. The greater part of that 50% will be euthanized due to illnesses or injuries that cannot be treated. The greater part of those fatal illnesses and injuries are directly related to human activity. I’m not even gonna soapbox about this; you know where I stand on humanity’s detrimental impact on wildlife.

And believe it or not, we have three more flying squirrels, all males, approximately five to six weeks old! Their mother was killed when the tree their nest was in was felled for firewood. The people who found the babies got them to me within two hours of their mother’s death, so they didn’t get fed the wrong thing or get dehydrated—and they kept them under a heat lamp until they brought them to me, so they didn’t get chilled, either! Do you know how good that is for a rehabber’s blood pressure?!

So here ya go—more flyer cuteness with LWR’s official first babies (of any species) of the year!