Butterflies

I am, by necessity, very good in general with first aid.  Ever since I was a child, due to both clumsiness and stupidity, I have had bad encounters with sharp objects.  

Actually, most of the encounters were because of stupidity:

• When I was 7,  I wanted to know what would happen to my right forefinger if I turned it in a little pencil sharpener.  (My nail came off like a pencil shaving.)
• When I was 12, I tried to kick open a French door.  (30 stitches in my heel and knee.)
• When I was 13, a glass broke in my hand as I was washing it.  (Stitches between  my left thumb and forefinger.  Not my fault, really.)
• Many times I sliced off the tip of my left forefinger while cutting bagels.  (Most of the time the tip grew back and actually calloused; once I had to get it stitched back on.)

I mention only the most memorable accidents.  By the time I was 12, my family doctor had taught me how to create a butterfly bandage in order to close small wounds and save me the trip to the emergency room for stitches.  This is a skill I have employed for over 40 years, now: cut a 1.5" strip of surgical tape; hold it in the thumb and forefinger - if those digits are working - and close those fingers with the sticky side of the tape out; cut little notches just so > <;  after stopping the bleeding with pressure and elevation, pull the butterfly to close the gaping laceration.

As I got older, the injuries became more creative.  I became an avian wildlife rehabilitator and did triage on injured wild birds, so although my skills were put to good purpose, the game area grew.  I was no longer limited to knives and glass!  

• A great blue heron (with a 4 inch beak) stabbed me and missed my right eye by half an inch.  (Inexperience handling herons helps you learn how to properly handle herons and control their heads.)
• A Barn owl with an injured left leg grabbed the base of my right forefinger with its mouse-killing talons.  Not my fault!  I was handling the bird gingerly because it had its leg injured by a buzz saw!  (My finger curled and my hand swelled for a few days.)
• I stabbed myself in the thigh with a scalpel after a crow necropsy during West Nile season.  That was so, so stupid.   (After stopping the blood, I left the infirmary and no one noticed my shredded, bleeding scrubs, because I was working in the infirmary with shredding, bleeding birds.  That's the picture I included.)

It all kinds of blends into a lifetime bubble of cuts and blood.

This brings me to my most recent, stupid accident.  

My friend Marcie gave me a lovely gift when she returned from Alaska last summer:  a little portable folding blade based on an Inuit tool.  It was attached to a slip-ring to put on a  keyring.  It was very sharp, Marcie warned; that is when the bells should have rung for me to thank her and just put the thing away.  But instead I did attach it to my keyring.

And it has taken 6 months to prove hazardous.  This is what I did to myself:  as the car warmed up this morning I opened a mailing envelope, which was fortified and inpenetrable without a blade.  I had a blade, and conscientiously and carefully slit open the package.  It was a book.  I read the first page and was excited to read the rest.

I put the keys in the ignition, drove to work, removed the keys, put them in my pocket, then remembered to check the doors by grabbing the keys in my pocket to auto-lock the doors.

Like most of the self-maimings, nothing hurt immediately.  My finger was slit deep (again, the poor forefinger, this time the right one).  Before it started bleeding, I grabbed it and held it tight.  I raised my hands over my head (pressure and elevation to stop bleeding).  I went to the front office at work to ask if there was betadine anywhere.  There was not.  I got the first aid kit.  I took it to the bathrom sink. I took out peroxide, gauze pads, bandaids and neosporin.  I got scissors.  I got a co-worker.  I showed her how to fashion a butterfly bandage from a bandaid.  

All this time I was holding off the wound from bleeding, and now it hurt.  The more I moved the more it hurt.  I leaned into the sink to finally take my hand off the wound and clean it.  It didn't look good, bleeding badly once the pressure was removed.  

I poured peroxide over the now-bubbling laceration and again applied pressure with gauze.  I went to my office, sat down, peeking occasionally to see if the bleeding stopped.  It did not.  

Finally, my finger fell off.  No, it didn't!  The butterfly applied by another co-worker, by the end of the day my hugely wrapped finger was safe, clean and secured from further assault.  

I removed the blade from my key ring later that day.  I did it with one hand.  I am, by necessity, very good using one hand.

Fly Eggs

It was 9pm. The baby birds were fed and covered, and evening medications had been administered.  I knew that all I had to do was to get comfortable for Beth to arrive with the owl.   I turned on one of our large incubators and jacked the temperature up to 105°.  I placed a thick towel on the stainless steel examination table.  I filled a mug with hot water, placed a syringe with 20cc lactated ringers solution into it, scooped some ice cream into bowl, and sat down to read a book about harriers.  Five minutes later, the car pulled in.

When she had called earlier, Beth identified the large owl she’d found that day as a Great horned owl.  Horned owls are the largest, most powerful owl in the area. They range from 18 to 25 inches tall, the female tending to be larger than the male, and can weigh two, three, even four pounds.  Great horned owls are called “Cat Owls,” probably because of their size, large, yellow eyes, black pupils and ear-like feather tufts at the tops of big, round heads. For the most part, any encounter with one is from a prey’s perspective, below the owl, as they tend to perch high in trees. Like a cat, a Great horned owl can remind you of your insignificance with just a glance.

We have enhanced the world for Great horned owls; they eat what we consider “vermin,” and in our fumbling with local ecosystems, vermin have more or less followed us through history. The resulting food sources (mice, rats, squirrels) provide a rich and varied diet for this not-very-picky, opportunistic predator. For this reason, and for their ferocity, Great horned owls are also called “Tigers of the Forest.”

At our busy wild bird hospital we are always a little dubious when people identify raptors. I have personally traveled to get a “baby eagle” or a “young hawk” from well-meaning homeowner’s back yards – birds that ended up being pigeons or woodpeckers.  Once I went to a home in rural New Jersey to get a “huge” owl out of a wood-burning stove.  “How big is it?” I asked the woman who frantically summoned our center with her plight.  I needed to know because if I am going to open a stove door and meet a cornered, four-pound Tiger of the Forest, well, I’d like to prepare myself.  To answer me, her eyes opened wider and she held her hands one over the other, 24 inches apart.  I put on elbow long, thick welder’s gloves, opened the stove door and found an eight inch Eastern screech owl staring sleepily at me.

People have entered our center carrying refrigerator boxes with tiny nestling robins gaping frantically within.  Or a small dog carrier stuffed with a Great blue heron.  When Beth and her husband carried the plywood board with the garbage container sitting over it into the infirmary, I tilted it up and saw the huge, golden- feathered feet tipped with long black talons.

This was a Great horned owl.  She was huge, but pathetically thin and blind.  One eye was ruined; the black of the pupil was torn and misshapen. The other eye was filled internally with blood, as if it had been struck.  Her keel – the breast bone, named for the boat-underside that it resembles – was blade-sharp, almost concave on either side, lacking any fat or muscle.  On the owl’s rump, under and over the tail, in the downy feathers and in the vent and preen gland, were fly eggs, more fly eggs than I had personally ever encountered.

If you did not know fly eggs, you’d probably not recognize them as the preface to the voracious grubs which they become: maggots.  Fly eggs appear innocuous: pale yellow, powdery-looking, they look like you could just brush them off, like snow. But the eggs are not powdery; they are sticky, like cotton candy, and to pry them off feathers is no small task.   In fact, I had stayed late because Beth had mentioned that there were flies around the owl, so I was prepared for eggs or for maggots.

I was relieved to see eggs.  Anyone who has dealt with injured animals in the summer knows why.  It takes about 24 hours for maggots to hatch from the eggs. Besides not eating, squirming and swimming through open and closed flesh, fly eggs suggested that the bird wasn't down long.

I placed the owl into the warm incubator to stabilize her and began to gather anything I might need to pick off fly eggs.  I had never done this alone – usually one of us holds the raptor while the other person treats it - and I didn't want to make the mistake of shorting myself on what I needed for cleaning her.  I searched for the long, slant-ended, fly-egg-maggot-picking tweezers. I'm sure they must be called something else and created for other purposes, these instruments, but they perfect for picking a number of eggs or maggots at once with their half-inch slanted tips, as opposed to picking one at a time with regular tweezers. Even with them, I saw myself picking fly eggs by the millions into the morning.

I put thick leather gloves, and after about 30 minutes - long enough to be sure the she was warmed - I carefully slid the owl out of the incubator.  She was weak, but still strong enough to grab and hold the towel on which she lay.  She wouldn't let go, even as I tried to work it out of her feet, each of which were, by the way, about half the size of my hand.  Okay, I thought, I'm not going to make an issue out of this.  I could always use an extra towel around her feet.

At the examination table, holding both her legs under her belly with my left hand, I lay the big owl on her side on a clean towel, her feet away from me, covering her head with part of that towel and wrapping her feet with the one she was holding.  This way if I got too absorbed in my egg-picking I couldn't inadvertently tilt my head into those taloned feet and find myself attached to a very pissed-off owl.

She lay still, as most birds do when you cover their heads and don’t hurt them.  Debilitated as she was, her big feet yet held tight to her towel.  Her sharp keel was testimony to her hunger. A healthy female Great-horned owl can weigh over four pounds and make meals of skunks and Canada geese. This owl weighed maybe 20 ounces and had probably eaten nothing for days.  I carefully examined her mouth, beak and ears. Flies infest any openings as well as wounds.  Her mouth was very pale and pasty, indicating shock and dehydration.  I would give her fluids later. In the meantime, I applied ophthalmic antibiotic ointment to her eyes.

I had prepared gauze pads and two small bowls of warm water and betadine: one for cleaning and swabbing the owl’s skin, the other for dunking the tweezers of the eggs. I sprayed the owl’s rump with an oily medicine that kills maggots, and began picking eggs, methodically, dunking and swabbing.  There were so many eggs that I put down the slanted-edged tweezers and used my gloved fingers, to get more mileage, as it were.   But fly eggs are tenacious, and after about five minutes of finger-picking, I resorted again to the tweezers.

I lost track of time.  My world became confined to the soft rear of a Great-horned owl’s rump and my objective in life was limited to the picking and picking of the fly eggs on it.  From big masses of eggs I had reduced the load to small clumps, close to the base of her downy feathers. They were hard to remove without tearing out feathers.  I wasn’t sure of the priorities.  I decided to sacrifice some feathers for the cleaning of eggs.

By midnight, the owl’s rump was clean of fly eggs. She lay still, but I could see the soft rise of her breath.  I wrapped her in the towel, lifted her gently, tilted up her head and tubed her the lactated ringers solution. The fluids – which I had to warm again - would help rehydrate her.

I’d done as much as possible. Tomorrow, we’ll see if she’s up for a more comprehensive examination. Maybe we can then make sense of her injuries.

I put her back into the incubator, propping her on a towel to support her breast so her poor eyes were safe from the walls if the incubator. She had objected to nothing of the indignities of the evening.

She still had the towel with her feet.

Moving Day, December 7, 1999

Yesterday Alan said that being a chess champion is nothing compared to what we have to do moving birds from one cage to another.  At our large bird rehabilitation center, as the health each bird grows, so should the size of the cage.  But the logistics often confound us because we usually have more birds than cages to house them.  So while two birds are getting cage exercise prior to release in one of our bigger flight cages, five may be waiting in smaller cages, like a batting lineup.  We must wait for the lead-off batter to get to first, maybe a double, and the bases behind the batter open, and the next batter steps up. In other words: we must wait for the large cages to be empty by releasing their inmates before we move more birds on.

The ideas behind the moving of birds also are pertinent: are we working against time, trying to release a bird during migration?  That bird can jump the line-up.  Are we going to overwinter the bird?  An overwintering bird can wait, but not a bird that has to move with the season.

So here’s what we did today:

At 9 AM we boxed and shipped a Broad-winged hawk and an Osprey to Florida (both having missed migration by recuperating at our center for a number of months) to be released tomorrow.  Moving the Broadie was key, as that opened up what we call our Small Flight cage, which is 75’x25’.

The players were now in motion: as soon we cleaned that now-empty cage, Jeff and I moved two Red-tailed hawks and a Turkey vulture from the smaller Crow cages into the waiting Small Flight.  When we entered its cage, the vulture, from its high perch, greeted us by unleashing yesterday’s meal.  It is a rotten, fetid substance, vulture vomit.  While Jeff netted the vulture and I cleaned up the cage, Jean moved two more Red-tails into the Small Flight.   So now there were four Red-tails and a Turkey vulture in the Small Flight, ready for flight exercise they could not have gotten in the smaller cages.

Jeff and I went to the Waterfowl Cage, where there were two young Snowy owls. Snowy Owls are the largest and heaviest owls in North America at 1.6 kg, or almost 4 pounds.  The Snowies, this year's babies, were hatched and raised by our resident, unreleasable adult Snowies.  Now they are juveniles, fully as large if not fatter than their parents.   We each netted and grabbed a huge and annoyed young Snowy, and moved them into The Cage Next to Tiger, which Jean had just emptied of its Red-tail inmates.  We are waiting for the government paperwork to allow us to take the youngsters to Kay Mckeever’s Owl Foundation in Ontario, where they will stay until they are released in Manitoba next spring.  Why were the Snowies in the waterfowl cage?  It’s big, and so are they, and we wanted them to get some exercise.    The Waterfowl Cage was the only large cage available at the time.

Moving out the Snowies opened up the Waterfowl cage, in which there is a large pool for swimming birds.  We needed the pool to make sure a Black duck (recovering from a broken leg) could swim properly.  And a juvenile Mute swan in a small recovery cage must be in water. We also needed to test-fly and exercise two Ring-billed gulls.  Jeffrey took the swan and a gull, I took the duck and a gull, and after 10 minutes of moving these four birds from the various cages on the Trust’s 17 acres, we met in the Waterfowl cage.

And there they were: a surly Mute swan, a very nervous Black duck and two happy gulls. The swan immediately began to harass the duck, and the very high strung duck flew repeatedly across the cage, bouncing off the netted sides.  

Bad swan.  The duck, we feared, would hurt itself in the cage.  We confirmed that it could indeed fly and swim, so I was assigned the job of releasing it in The Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge.  I packed up the Black duck in a carrier, drove deep into the Swamp, and released it.  The Black duck skittered into the water.  Home run.  Hundreds of mallards and blacks swirled in the sky, dazzling me.

Back to the center.  I netted and released a House finch from the Finch Cage and moved three more House finches that were treated in the infirmary for two weeks into the cage just vacated.

Soon after that Jean asked me to hold a Red-tailed hawk for for her to examine.  The hawk could not stand (it had wacked itself into a window trying to get out of a warehouse) and suffered, we think, some central nervous system damage, from which it may or may not recover.  We had to be sure nothing was broken.  Jean examined its left leg while I held the other leg and the bird’s head, to keep it from footing or biting her.

“Hmmm. I don’t know if this foot works,” she mused.  Then that foot reached over and grabbed my bare right hand, impaling my middle finger with a very large, sharp talon at the end of its very powerful working Red-tail foot.

“It works,” I hissed, “the foot definitely works. Get… it… off… me...please.”  The trick in getting unloosed from a raptor’s angry talons is to go limp, as if you were a dead squirrel.

Any small movement on the captive’s part incites the raptor to dig in deeper for the kill.  This is difficult, because being footed hurts.  I tried to think of puppies playing in a soft bed  While I held onto the other foot, Jean pried the talons off my hand.  She sent me to clean myself up and dress the wound.

I did.  I am, by necessity, very good in general with first aid.

It was three o'clock.  The game was finally over in twelve innings.  My back hurt, my finger was swollen and now frozen, claw-like, and my clothes were splattered with in a variety of bird substances.

But I did not get puked on by the vulture.