He was acting quite dull and it is up to us to determine why that is. For this bird in particular – we could see his injured toe, but he also just seemed off and we weren’t exactly sure why. M: So, once he was in your care, check-up and treatment consisted of what, exactly? What does it look like when a bird like this one ends up in a raptor rehab facility?Įmily: The first and most important thing we do for wildlife patients is supportive care. Ouch, ouch, ouch – you can see how infected and swollen that digit on his left foot was. That slow decline is why, I think, he was looking for those easy food sources in backyards in Denver. He was slowly declining, as you witnessed. When you’re out there in the wild, there’s no antibiotics or anything, so it was going to invade the rest of him in time. More than likely through hunting, or landing, or perching… somehow he broke that talon off digit two, bacteria invaded the wound, and as it sealed up a bad infection took root. When we received him, the second digit on his left foot was very swollen – after some diagnostics, which we’ll talk through in a bit, it became apparent that this swelling was consistent with a broken talon. As these guys learn to hunt and maneuver their landscape, they go for broke and hit their prey hard – or sometimes, as they’re learning, they perch and land too hard. From his markings, we can tell for sure this is an immature red-tail. Emily, could you walk us through what may have happened to him, before he entered our lives and ended up in your care?Įmily: First off, it is worth mentioning that less than 25% of birds of prey make it to their first birthday – it’s a tough life out there. And wonderful to see you looking well, red-tail. Special thanks goes to Rocky Mountain Wildlife Alliance, Nature’s Educators, Critter Care Animal Hospital, and the other nature-based organizations who contributed to this work. I met with Emily this week for the release of the hawk, as well as for a short interview about her work, what it means to work in raptor rehabilitation, and how Leave No Trace principles can help the public better support our avian friends. Emily serves as the Founder, Executive Director, and Certified Wildlife Rehabilitator for Rocky Mountain Wildlife Alliance and nursed him back to health. A few phone calls later, we got in touch with the hero of this bird’s story, Emily Davenport. We caught him with nothing more than a little patience and a mesh wire bucket – and that was the indicator that something was wrong with this bird. In an academic past, I’ve had to be inventive in capturing hawks – using centuries-old falconry techniques like dho gazas and bal-chatri traps to capture them. She was unsure what to do as the perpetrator remained on her premises despite attempts to scare it away.Īs a former raptor biologist and forever raptor enthusiast, I ended up being her first dial. A relative amateur to the world of animal husbandry, she’d come home to find her beloved pet duck out in the yard… sans its head. In March of this year, I received a phone call from my wife’s coworker.
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