Nine pounds seven ounces, this little fellow. Found on a nearby federal wildlife refuge where he was unable to fly. We had done the initial examination and could not find a broken bone in his thickly muscled and well fed body. No pellet wounds under the feathers, and no fish hooks in the mouth. Just a bird that was so unable to fly that puny mostly hairless ground apes could catch him.
Notice his talons and feet are wrapped in a protective layer of cheap masking tape. With those death hooks wrapped in a ball and secured like this, those grabbers are out of the fight. Also notice how I have my arms extended fully, both pinning the wings and keeping the head down lower on my chest. Yup, doing everything right and according to the book. Well, until Mr Freedom and Liberty twists, pops a wing out and I try to adjust my hold.
And there's where the dang nab wheels came off my short bus. He lunged with his legs to get another two inches of elevation, stretched his 14 avian neckbones up to full extension and started feeding on my face. He only got one bite, but I am now missing most of my left nostril.
The other vet, not shown in the pic, grabbed a towel, stepped behind me and pressed it to the side of my face to staunch the shiny red hydraulic fluid leak (and possibly to cover my mouth to muffle the shrieks and curses). The vet in the picture put the large dog crate on the table and I popped Hannibal the Cannibal Animal into his own private high security cell.
Vets are the only folks less likely to get worked up about booboos and ouchies than battlefield trauma doctors, and they got to work stopping the flow ofr blood and slapping a couple butterfly bandages on the wound. We finished the paperwork with a few jokes at my expense and I drove off to secure the bird until he could later be transported to the waiting licensed rehabilitators. I finished a few more errands and popped into the next Urgent Care I ran across.
There were a few folks in the waiting room and by the time I had explained I wanted someone more familiar with doctoring humans than the prior horse docs, they were all pressed up to the admissions desk to see. There was some talk of HIPAA violations, patient privacy, and how people needed to take their seats until they were called upon. But they ushered me in to a room pretty quick, despite how there wasn't even a drop of blood on my tshirt, much less spurting across the room.
The nurse visited. The supervising nurse visited. Then two attending nurses were ushered in by the supervising nurse again. This was followed by a Physician's Assistant, a Doctor, a pair of really cute nursing students that stood jaws slack and gaping, the janitor, a plumber that had been called in to fix the ladies crapper, and the Girl Scout Troop on a field trip to visit a real medical facility. I was asked to relate the story to each and every party in turn, including showing photos on my phone of the image above, plus any pics we had of the owls, because, I mean, who doesn't love owls, right? Am I right?
Long story short (which of French for an apology for taking up all your time), I got one internal stitch that will dissolve eventually, and three externals. One little dangly bit of skin was apparently on the inside of the nostril and was trimmed off since it didn't appear to really fit back into the puzzle as they were putting it together. And I will never have symmetry with my beak, barring another eagle and the other side, but knowing my luck, it's be the left all over again.
Later that night, to add insult to injury, Hannah called to ask to do my best to guess exactly how much the piece bitten off might have weighed. She had called the vet's office as soon as she heard of the accident and asked they search the floor for the missing piece. You know, just in case the doc could sew it back on. It could not be found, and our best guess is the
damned bird ate it! I told her that it could not have been more than one or two grams, then asked why she needed to know this.
With the droll delivery of a sweet country girl all grown up and soon to start her senior year at a prestigious ivy league college, she said, "Oh, I need to record it in the bird's Feeding Log".
