Helping a Great Blue Heron

 If you're going to make so much as a stab at wildlife rehabilitation, you have to be ready and willing to have your plans changed with the ring of a telephone.
In order to get my state rehabilitator's permit, I must supply my home phone number, which is then published in a booklet that goes to every wildlife officer, soil conservation service, park, and veterinarian in the state.
This is not as I would like it to be, but it is what it is.
In the summer I get a lot of calls. Most people I can help over the phone. But sometimes I have to do a run.

A great blue heron standing hurt on the porch of an abandoned house is cause for a run.

In this day of cell phones and zapping photos, you can find out a lot before you ever climb in the car. The people who found this heron walking through their front yard sent me this photo:

 

and although the bird looks OK, I could see it was in terrible trouble with its left foot. A heron needs its feet, and this one looked to have a middle toe, at least, that was badly broken and maybe infected.

There was a lot of stuff everywhere and the heron had been climbing around their yard, looking for who knows what. Help, probably. Baby birds do weird things; injured birds go weird places. Who knows what they're thinking. Maybe they're thinking someone can help them. It's not too farfetched to guess that.

 These folks have banks of cages with stray cats they've taken in in their yard; the cats are being fed and medicated, and maybe the heron saw that and put two and two together.

 I don't know. Maybe. It made its way there from the river across the highway.

So I hurried to get there, and found the heron staring at minnows in a baby pool that the people had thoughtfully provided it.

 It was a baby heron, probably not long at all out of the nest. I could tell that by its pale feather edgings and the barred look of its neck feathers; by the lack of any breeding plumage at all. You can see all this best in the first photo. I guessed that perhaps it had broken its toe getting tangled in monofilament in the nest, a common and very sad occurrence. Fishermen who leave those big tangles of mono hanging in trees are so careless, so thoughtless, just getting good birds in bad trouble. It's a terrible thing to do, because herons and ospreys, among others, think monofilament looks like lovely nesting material. They incorporate it in their nests and once tangled in it a baby bird is in deep trouble.
 It cuts like a knife, embeds itself in flesh, breaks bones, and will not give way when the bird struggles.

 

 I donned some goggles and gloves and easily captured the bird, grabbing the neck and bill first. Herons will put your eye out in a single lightning strike, but this one was much too weak to be lightningy.

 

I had brought some Ensure in a syringe, and I fed the poor emaciated thing. Sure enough, its foot was terribly infected, the middle and outer toe with compound fractures, giving it a very poor prognosis for survival. Foot infections in birds can be intractable. And herons need to perch, need to walk to forage. They can't do with only one or two functional toes on a foot.

 

Looking inside its bill, I was alarmed to find reddish, oblong parasites which Kristi at the Ohio Wildlife Center advised over the phone are flukes. She said most herons have them and they don't seem to cause problems. But oh, yuck. Flukes in the gape. Poor weakened thing, it didn't need to have flukes, too.

There was nothing to do but drive this bird to the Ohio Wildlife Center in Columbus, 2 1/2 hours away, to see if there was any hope at all for its foot and its future.

I drove, enjoying the beautiful July Ohio countryside, snorting the stench of sick heron poo out of my nose, musing on futility and stupid old hope, knowing this bird was probably too far gone, too badly injured to be salvaged, but at the same time unable to leave it there on the porch, staring into a baby pool.

 

 It died that very night, probably before I even got home, but someone--the two who found it; me; the staff and veterinarian at OWC-- at least cared, someone tried.

 Another day, another try.