From soggy to snowy

Yep, last weekend, my area of Georgia got a rare and short-lived dusting of snow—beautiful and fun for those of us who generally have to travel to Parts North to see the white stuff.

And what does the weather have to do with wildlife rehab? Only everything—the nastier the weather, the harder it is for wildlife to forage for food, the more desperate they get, and the greater the risks they’ll take for food. Take, for instance, these sparrows and cardinals on my walkway, where I scatter food for them year-round: they were quite literally flocking to the walkway in the rain, sleet and snow, because they knew there would be food there. These are the few that didn’t fly away when I started snapping photos, but as soon as the camera disappeared the cold, hungry birds came back in force.

 

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For insectivores like bluebirds and robins, winter is hard enough; ice and snow make finding food even more difficult.

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Robins eat ice-crusted berries.

Close-up of robin in icy tree

And it’s even harder for raptors like red-tailed hawks. Laurens Wildlife Rescue had an adult male red tail come in recently with a broken wing—he’d hit a vehicle antenna in hot pursuit of prey. On the heels of last update’s great horned owl escaping serious injury from an encounter with a barbed wire fence and, after treatment, being released back in the area where she was found, this poor red tail was a definite downer. His wing had a nasty open fracture, with about an inch each of two bones exposed. There was nothing we could do for this fellow except end his suffering humanely.

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And just this week, I got a 911 call about a barred owl found in the middle of the road. Since I met the finders in a parking lot, a full exam had to wait until I got home with the small male. It was obvious once he was under decent light that his left wing was broken, and he was bleeding from the beak, as well. When I turned him over to check his chest and legs, his right leg flopped awkwardly out to the side. Neither fracture was open, though, so I held out some slim hope that maybe the breaks were “fixable.”

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He’d come in at night, so I had to wait until the next day to get him to Smalley’s for a thorough exam. Vet Shelley Baumann confirmed that the left wing was broken in two places, at the shoulder and wrist, and the right leg was broken above and below the knee. Additionally, the bird was still bleeding from the roof of his mouth and had not pooped at all since he’d come in the previous night, which is a sign of spinal injury. Basically, he was “unfixable;” once again, all we could do was end his suffering.

If this trend continues, I may have to change my last name to Kevorkian…