Another day of rehab

I returned to my normal life today. I figured that I have recovered enough from my foot injury as well as my cold, to head out to the wildlife place for a morning of hard work.  It was a pretty routine day of rehab and most of the animals were pretty straightforward. The one thing I will mention is that I have a new volunteer who is driving me nuts, her name is Anita and she has worked with me the last two weeks.  But I'll save her story for another day.

We have been treating a mallard duck for a few weeks now,  that first came in because he was hit by a car and unable to stand.  During the last few weeks he is now able to not just stand but also swim and is starting to get much feistier so it’s been awesome seeing him recover.  He is making more and more progress every day and today I was the one able to tube feed him all by myself. The other long time case that is still hanging out is this baby barn owl that got caught up in a cars bike rack one night and has two broken wings. He is also showing lots of signs of recovering and has been able to fly for short distances and is starting to hunt and eat great. So he seems to also be recovering more each day as well.  Its nice to have a few of those cases that have been around long enough that I still get to have a part in it even though I come in once a week.

The other big news is that our baby pigeons are no longer babies anymore, now having all the adult feathers grown in and are soon to be released.  They are pretty crazy little birds and its unbelievable that they went from being as tiny as they were and getting tube fed every 2 hours, to the huge  almost adults they look like today.  They are showing a lot less signs of wanting human interaction and attention and now are becoming more fearful and reserved of me as I entered into the enclosure and cleaned it out. This is great because one of the fears the rehabbers had with these guys  a few weeks ago was that they would be too attached to the human side of life and not be able to successfully live in the wild.

Other animals hanging out were a very cool sea bird who I forget the name of that seems to be blind in one eye but they are hoping that his blindness will not prevent him from being able to survive. They have set him up with some various obstacles and live fish to make sure he is still able to hunt and swim around like he would in the wild. We have a few seagulls with various injuries that are still recovering. One came in with this huge hook stuck in the side of his head and today I was able to watch the surgery to remove it. Very cool. He should wake up and recover fully and be released in a day or two.  And finally our little sick aviary birds are still in quarantine and not yet showing signs of recovery so it’s still touch and go with them.

Well I know this was kind of a lame post, especially since it was my first in about a week. But it’s been a kinda slow day so far for me. I'm considering this a good thing having a slow day.  Maybe tomorrow when I head back to work I’ll have more exciting things to ramble about.