yahoo

I completed my 3 months of training! I have trained in ICU, Rehab and Education, so I can tutor any new people who come in to volunteer. Now that I had each section out of the way, I started again in ICU. I really like ICU because it is so hands on and in the summer its nice to be in air conditioning and in winter its good to be inside and warm. HAHA. Right now the intake of animals is low but at the same time that is good because that means animals aren't getting hurt! A lot of birds are migrating right now so their chances of getting injured increase. This is due to them possibly being hit by cars, powerlines, animals they might not be used to encountering etc. Not related to the season changes is the high mortality among raptors due to ingesting lead from hunted animals. When a carcass is left with lead this absorbs into the body of the dead animal, then when other animals such as eagles or turkey vultures feed on the carcass they ingest this lead. The lead then infects their own bloodstream making the birds very sick and many times leading to death. Recommendations to fix this problems are using as much of the carcass as possible and properly disposing the rest, copper bullets or removal of the bullet if at all possible. I will get off my soapbox now but to learn more about lead poisoning in birds you can click
here
.

Back to ICU. IT was an exciting day.I completed my first successful bird grab. I had done a bird grab before but that was on kestrels which are smaller and also a severely injured owl that wasn't really a training in grabbing. I had first tried to get a red tail hawk out of its cage for him to receive his medicine but he outwitted me. He was able to get my right hand in his steel grip talons and I had to have my friend mike bail me out. Again this is another situation where bird handling gloves come in handy. I still can't believe how strong raptor grasps are, even with the gloves I could feel the talons digging in and even with the glove I had minor scratches on my arm. ( VERY very minor, not even worth documenting really but i couldn't believe it broke skin through the glove, imagine what it could do on bare skin). Here is my buddy mike and the red tail hawk that won.

After that unsuccessful grab I tried again on a cooper's hawk. This time I just went for it fast to give the bird no chance to grab my glove and it worked! Even I was a little surprised at how efficient that fast process worked. Here is me holding the cooper's hawk, sorry for the horrible picture of myself, i am a wreck. haha. . I also grabbed a couple kestrel's later but they are so small you can just cup them with two hands and dont have to worry about one hand being tied up due to them grabbing you.

Later, my team lead was feeding a Harris Hawk while I was tending to some seed eaters and all of a sudden I hear " Bird out! Big Bird out!!" and I turn around to see the Harris Hawk loose in the ICU room! A very organized chaos followed, everyone quickly donned gloves but the big bird net was outside! It was now going to be a little harder to grab this Harris Hawk. Luckily my team lead grabbed a towel and was able to throw it over the hawk and grab him. He was an angry hawk he probably thought his freedom was so close!

That about wraps it up for ICU this week. Now I have to go back to studying for finals boo!