She Shall Be Released!

Liam arrived from Morgantown about dinnertime on Saturday, November 23 for his Thanksgiving break. He had a well-aerated cardboard carrier with him. And in that carrier was precious cargo: the redtail, coming home. All that care and medication and rehab had paid off and she was ready for release! He'd picked her up at Cheat Lake Animal Hospital that afternoon. I couldn't believe how smoothly this was all working out. 

The night turned wet and bone-chillingly cold, with rain changing to wet snow. I was happy that our mighty redtail was in our protected basement and not facing a night like that outside. I'm sure she didn't love being in a box, but I comforted myself by thinking about the 30 days she might spend in springtime, lying over her eggs. She'd be fine overnight, resting on soft toweling. 

Better there than in a freezing rain.

I'd been giving my Jemima book talk to Master Naturalists at the New River Gorge in West Virginia Friday evening. It was a blast. Stayed overnight at Opossum Creek Resort. Saturday morning, I took a last long hike with Curtis along the Fern Creek/Endless Wall trail (fabulous!) and headed home at midday. We hit the grocery store on my 3 hour drive home, and I proceeded to go totally Martha Stewart. Knowing that you're going to release a redtail the next morning is cause for celebration. Saturday evening, I cooked like mad, making kits for a couple of gouda and broccoli quiches, arugula salad and the piece de resistence, a persimmon custard pie. All to be assembled and baked on Release Morning, bright and early. 

I invited a few friends who'd been especially involved in her story. Tanya and Shila, who'd provided moral support. Chris, who drove her to Morgantown, took the first shift carrying her box out to the meadow where she had pinned me down a month earlier.

Liam took over as we neared the hayfield.

He set the carrier down in the middle of the open field. We wanted to give her room to fly, and we wanted to have her in view for as long as possible.

I very carefully opened the carrier, and she sat back and considered her situation for several minutes. 

We were all in a wide circle around her, our iPhone cameras at the ready. 

She didn't like that, so we pulled back a bit more. I used my 300 mm telephoto for these shots. 

Man, she looked beautiful, just ablaze with life. 

I tiptoed closer to check on her and she woke up and began to consider using the sudden space over her head. Shila was lucky to be standing directly in front of her when she finally took off, and professional photographer in her kicked in as she kept the camera rock-steady on the bird flying right at her face. She had set it to slow motion to capture the wing action and the pure magic of something we knew would spool out all too quickly. Well done, Shila!!

My real-time video, which Blogger will not accept, captured our heroine taking umbrage at my quick peek, and getting the heck out of that box, that meadow full of people, the whole scene. She was gone, brother, gone. Strong and beautiful and gone.  

She landed a few hundred yards away, in the woods, and roused her feathers a couple of times. Then she zigzagged gracefully through the trees, turning on her side once to make a narrow passage, and headed for Dean's Fork, where I bet she took a cold soaking bath to clean those soiled feathers. 

We have released the hawk! She lives to fly another day, to eat rabbits and refurbish her nest and raise some more hawks!  We high-fived and smiled fit to split our faces. Now we feast!  She'd been feasting for almost a month; this bird that came in at 2.4 lb. was now tipping the scales at 2.75 lb (1250 gm). Ack. That's a lotta hawk!

We repaired to the warm kitchen, where we filled up on delicious homemade things. It was a fine, fine morning, a great day with good friends. Part of me is still flying with that huge, ornery, gorgeous, terrifying, totally worth it redtail. 

Cue The Roches singing, "Persimmon Custard Pie...." in three part harmony

If you have enjoyed this multi-part story, please send your thanks to the Avian Conservation Center of Appalachia, a small but mighty clinic in Morgantown, WV, with the best vets and volunteers you could find. They took in more than 400 creatures this season. Jesse Fallon and his devoted volunteers do this on their own time. He's a hard-working small animal veterinarian who cares about all wild things, and knows just what to do to heal them.

Donate here, please. 

Thank you!!!

Testing Her Wings: Redtail Update

Wildlife rehab, and especially avian rehabilitation, is not just bunnies in baby blankets, though rabbits certainly present their own unique challenges. When you're trying to heal a bird, you've got to make darn sure it's going to be flightworthy before you turn it loose.

By November 17, our barbed-wire redtail was eating voraciously and it looked as though her patagium was healing well. But would she be flightworthy? Jesse was worried about her patagium and especially the area around her wrist, which looked "abnormal," in his words.

There would be only one way to tell if she could fly well enough to be released, and that was creance flying. One person holds the bird, and a second person (Dr. Jesse Fallon) holds a long thin line attached to jesses around its legs. An ACCA volunteer releases the bird, and Jesse hauls ass behind her as she flies, like this:







Oh, that's encouraging! Let's try it again.
No good deed goes unpunished. Jesse finds a hole in the field and goes down like a thrown steer. His heartless writer wife Katie giggles. Just kidding. They're both all heart, and dear friends.






 Having recovered his composure and apparently uninjured by his spectacular fall, Jesse explains about barbed wire injuries, and this bird's injuries in particular.



He said it. The R word. Release!! Readying for release! How do you like that, Formerly Doomed Redtail? I like it very much!

At this point, it seems meet to point out that the Avian Conservation Center of Appalachia is always grateful for donations to support the free medical assistance they offer to injured and orphaned wildlife. I wanted you to have a glimpse into what they do to ensure the birds are recovering and flight-ready. It's not just bandaging them up and tossing mice into their cage--it's physical rehab, too!

And for anyone wondering about the legality of taking an Ohio hawk to West Virginia for care, I've cleared it with the Ohio Division of Wildlife Permits Officer to have this bird treated in WV, then returned to Ohio for release. Gotta keep that stuff up front and out in the open. I live two hours from the closest wildlife rehab facility with veterinary staff (Ohio Wildlife Center in Columbus). ACCA is almost three hours from here, near Cheat Lake, WV. It's tough for wildlife rehabbers in my part of Ohio, really tough. Any way you cut it, you're going to kill an entire day transporting the creature. I appreciate these two facilities more than I can say, and I sure wish they weren't two and three hours away. 

Please donate here.

H is for Help!

Now, I have the hawk in a big supertough plastic tub. She'll be OK in there for the time being, but I have to drill some holes in it STAT. My heart is still beating out of my chest from the excitement of getting free from her painful footvise, then carrying her for a half mile, opening the front door with my face, carrying her through the house and down the basement steps, and successfully getting her into a plastic tub, all without getting re-clamped, perforated or, um,  enucleated by her wicked bill. I found out after the fact that she is a rarity for a buteo--a biter as well as a footer! 

 I get a kitchen knife, stab the tub lid in four places, and begin turning the knife to make a hole (my electric drill chops are absent; I didn't even think of trying to do that. I was in a hurry). I make four decent sized holes, and realize it's going for noon and I've had nothing to eat or drink. I stop to choke down some breakfast, then return to make more holes in the lid. I grab the knife and stab. Stab. Stab. I try a bunch of different places. Nothing happens. No matter what I do, I cannot make the slightest hole in that lid. I can't make so much as a dent!! What the hell?

I realize that, in my adrenaline-fueled rush, I was like the mother who lifts a car off her child. Had a hawk in the tub. Had to drill holes so it could breathe. If I didn't succeed, it might suffocate, or (more likely) I would have to handle it again, and THAT I did not want to do. So I stabbed and made four  holes in the lid, one with each try. And now, with the remove of a little time, having had a chance to eat and calm down a bit, I am weak as a kitten by comparison. So I decide just to enlarge the holes I made as SuperZick. Sheesh. Adrenaline is a beautiful drug.

Now, I have to get back out to my car in the hayfield, because Curtis is sitting out there, waiting for me to come back. The last he saw, I was prostrate on the ground, face down, with a hawk nailing my hand, and then I was walking away holding the dangerous bird out in front of me. There's another rescue to do. So I grab a bicycle and ride out, throw it in the weeds to hide it, and drive back home with one happy, wildly waggy and very relieved brindle dog. I give him his overdue breakfast.

That's an original watercolor on the floor there. He's a good boy, not the kind to stomp things.. 

Now, to figure out how to get this bird to help. I turn to Facebook, the oft-maligned but extremely useful outlet for you-name-it and what-have-you. I post a photo of the hawk lying helpless, impaled on the wire, and enter a plea for a ride for her ASAP to anyone heading to either Columbus, OH  (Ohio Wildlife Center) or Morgantown, WV, where two fine wildlife rehabilitation clinics are located. I don't think my plea had been up for two minutes when my friend Chris swoops in out of nowhere and says he's headed to Morgantown, home of Cheat Lake Animal Hospital and the Avian Conservation Center of Appalachia, this very afternoon. Wha wha wha?? woo HOOO!! and BOO YAH!!

Mr. Bennon, you are ON. I get his office address, pack up Curtis and the hawk and myself, and head for Parkersburg WV, about 40 minutes away. Chris is only too happy to help, and I am so happy to  turn his awesome orange truck into a redtail ambulance. After the morning I've had, I'm no good for a six hour round trip to deliver the bird to care. I am so thankful for my sweet friend, leaping to the rescue! Although I barely recognized him in his work clothes. He is usually grinding up ridiculous hills on his mountain bike.

Within three hours, the hawk is in caring, knowledgeable hands (as opposed to dumb, terrified ones) at the Avian Conservation Center of Appalachia in Morgantown, WV. You will remember them as the people who miraculously healed the emaciated, broken Grand Central Mall snowy owl of 2017.  Man, that was a story. I disappeared into that story. Another bolt of grace, that bird, for so many people.

A radiograph showed no bones had been broken.  (All subsequent photos courtesy ACCA). Isn't she beautiful in radiograph??

Her patagium  (the skin membrane that stretches from wrist to shoulder) was not beautiful. When I saw this photo, my heart sank. I can't even really tell what I'm looking at here. I just know it looks shredded and raw and very, very painful. The hawk was immediately put on painkillers and anti-inflammatories, and I was so glad of that.

The danger in barbed wire entrapments is not only broken bones, incurred as the bird struggles and flips itself around on the wire, often getting hung around several strands.  It's shredding and (often) snapping of the patagius longus tendon, with grave implications for future flight. This photo was taken Oct. 25, showing the damage to her patagium to be more extensive than it appeared at first. Her patagial tendon was damaged, but not snapped, and for that we are very grateful.

The bird's head would be to the right, and the big mass of injury is near the wrist of her extended right wing.

The wire as clipped by moi. Nope, I don't want to make jewelry out of it. 

Throw it out. Hateful stuff.

By October 28, the patagium was looking a lot better, though it wasn't exactly pretty. You have to look past the gross matted feathers, to the flesh, to see the progress.

In order to prevent scarring and resultant immobility, the hawk was regularly exercised under light anaesthesia, her injured wing stretched and extended repeatedly. This would have been painful without the anaesthesia. (The hood keeps her from seeing anything and freaking out.)

I was glad to hear she was being exercised under light anaesthesia. Any other approach would be unsafe with this individual. You don't want this bird mad at you. I have a whole new respect for redtails after handling her. I realize that every buteo I've picked up before her (and owls, too) has been either so compromised they had no strength to fight, or exceptionally kind.  I shudder to think of the people I've told over the phone not to worry about it, just put some heavy gloves on, throw a blanket over it, grab its ankles and you're in control!  Lord have mercy. This bird is a lightning-taloned Zickkiller, a demon from Hell. She was my match and then some.

Her intake photo, Oct. 25 2019. OMG. I just realized you can see the length of barbed wire still embedded in her right patagial membrane!!

She was brought in the afternoon of October 25. She refused to eat. This was worrisome because she'd come in underweight, at 1090 gm (2.4 lb). Jesse thought she could have hung on the wire, struggling, for as long as 24 hr. before I found her. It's hard to know. But it was imperative that she eat if she was going to heal. Finally on Oct. 28, Jesse force-fed her a small mouse, loaded with medications, and that began a turnaround. She began pouncing on everything tossed into her enclosure. 

Leave it to ACCA!  They are all about healing! And isn't she WONDERFUL here?? Be still my heart!!