Raptor week.

Its only the 2nd day of the work week for me and already so much has happened. Wednesday evening we had to give meds to one of our Red Tailed Hawks - it seemed intimidating, because usually the raptors are not on the med list (or we can just shove them into their food) and as you can guess, raptors are a little scarier than say.. a crow or pigeon. But in the end it was just like giving a shot to any animal - you just had to wear gloves and hold his feet still also :).
Thursday I started off watching our vet put a little foot wrap on another red tailed hawk - he had punctured his foot with his own talon.
Then we got in a young coopers hawk - who was so cute and small! Well, small for a hawk (still bigger than most birds we deal with), which probably means he is a boy.

(a young coopers hawk from wikipedia).
He had some dirty scrapped up wings - our hypothesis is that his legs are not working well, so he's dragging himself around by his wings. He had scraped one of the wings so much that some bone was exposed, so his prognosis is not promising, but I hope he makes it. He was a fiesty little guy :).
And then that evening I got to assist feed another red tailed hawk! Which means I shoved a dead mouse down his throat while someone else held him. I really had to push to get it down, and you end up with your finger all the way down his throat, it was cool! Then I massaged his chin/chest a little, to get him to finish swallowing (ie until there was no longer a mouse tail sticking out the corner of his mouth).

I also helped weigh our barn owl in the evening, and I was happy that my raptor handling skills have definitely improved.

In other non raptor news - we gave some meds to a little chickadee who was so fierce and tough for his size. He kept biting my hand while someone was giving him fluids, it was cute. It did actually hurt a tiny bit...

And the best part of my day - Someone brought in a young pigeon, and she was convinced it was a bald eagle! For the record it looked just like a pigeon, though he was a little balding. She said she had called fish and wildlife and described the bird and was sure it was an eagle. Then when we told her it was a pigeon, she said "Are you sure??" and seemed skeptical. I personally am pretty bad at recognizing birds, but pigeons are one of the few I know :).

Seals are still cute and bald eagles are scary.

It was a pretty full week at Paws. Wednesday started off pretty quiet - full of volunteers and not that much to do. Then we got the notice that two more seals where showing up at 4pm, AND our big donors would be going on a tour of the hospital at 7pm - so we had to clean up a lot. We worked on making the place more presentable, then at 6pm both seals showed up, and we split into two teams for their exams.
These guys had been born on a barge, then the barge moved too far for the mom to find them - which means they came to use healthier than some of the others, because they had not been abandoned for long.
The one we examined was nice and chubby and active - making him harder to check out. He was only a little dehydrated, and a little underweight and otherwise seemed fine. Since they came in together the two seals got to remain together, which is nice for them.
Then the next day on Thursday we got in ANOTHER young seal. This one a little less healthy - he was skinny enough you could see his hips. So now we're up to 5 seals - one chunky fat guy whose doing well (he was the one learning to eat fish). One younger one who has been clinging to life for a week, but still making it, and the 3 who came in this week...
We have some very tiny opposums who get tube fed still, and they are still very cute. Plus we got in our first set of young squirrels for the season - they are so tiny they don't really even have hair on them - you can't recognize them as squirrels! They are slightly lower than the weight we usually set to try to rehabilitate them, but we're trying anyways (And we're not sure yet what kind of squirrel they are).
Here is a video from youtube of a 3 week old fox squirrel getting syringe fed - this is what our little guys look like!


On Saturday I went with another volunteer to feed and clean our "young" bald eagle. He is giant even though he's still not bald. While we started cleaning he was perched on his box watching us. Then he decided to fly over us to let us know its his palace, and that was scary! He probably has a 5' wing span already, and we're in a enclosure that's maybe 7 feet wide (maybe 20 feet long), and he flies over us and we have to duck, then he lands right by the door and stares at us. We were slightly startled as you might imagine. Then he lifts up and flies back to his perch (we had to duck again). Eagles are sooo giant up close - especially his legs and talons. He didn't seem aggressive, just wanted to let us know what he could do. Thanks eagle.


(a picture of a juvenile eagle flying, from wikipedia.com).

We have so many raptors that they have to co-habilitate right now. In our largest enclosure (the flight pen) we have two coopers hawks and a great horned owl all hanging out together. They're pretty cute.