World’s luckiest Coop? Quite possibly!

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.