 Autumn Changes
The
urgency of frequent feedings changes over the summer to watching the
babies grow and catch their own food, to their release. Everyone
comments, in late August, about how slow it is, how empty the clinic is
... and then we got five birds in over the Labor Day weekend!
Right now we have an incredibly feisty young turkey vulture who clearly
got smacked by a car he was unable to get out of the way of ... a
fracture of the femur right above the knee and spiral fractures of both
the radius and ulna of the left wing - but the pieces in perfect
alignment! The alignment is fortuitous, because there’s no way we
could pin those bones without shattering all those pieces. The
picture I have in my mind of the accident is a car hitting him
broadside, with his wing still folded. I’m trying not to think it
was on purpose on the driver’s part but it’s hard to imagine those
injuries happening while he was flying. He’s scheduled for
surgery this morning for the femoral fracture.
We also have a Coopers hawk with spinal trauma, a sharp-shinned hawk
with broken bones across what would be the palm of our hand, a kestrel
caught by a cat with possible nerve damage to one wing ... as well as a
caught-by-cat nighthawk with a broken ‘thumb’ and green heron with a
fractured humerus, also slated for surgery today. All youngsters.
Yes, I know the latter two are not raptors but they arrived on our
doorstep and the all-species-but-raptors center asked us to keep them.
Still in care from earlier in the summer are three screech owls - one
adult whose talons melted and feathers burned when trapped in a wood
stove, and two youngsters with injuries who have yet to prove
themselves on live prey. Please keep your fingers crossed for all
of them! |
