Injured buzzard.

We have a new arrival at North Devon Hawk Walks. (www.NorthDevonHawkWalks.co.uk)  A friend found an injured buzzard by the roadside and brought him to us on Saturday.  He's obviously had a hard life so far.  His left eye is destroyed and he was very weak and wobbly. His feathers are very dishevelled ( always a sign of a bird that is in trouble) and his flight muscles  seem undeveloped.  His one good eye was not big and round as one would expect in a healthy bird, but more slit-like.  That's anothe obvious sign of a bird that is ill or very weak.

He is obviously quite young as he still has the speckled plumage of a juvenile.  That is, one that has not yet been through the moult and grown his adult plumage.  I would guess that he's been injured somehow, and because his eyesight is so impaired, he's had difficulty getting enough to eat.

My friend said that the bird had actually been hit by a motorcycle, but there's no evidence of external injury. His wings and legs appear to be working OK, but he was very, very weak and barely able to stand.

After checking him over, I left him alone in one of the carrying boxes I use for my hawks.  This is a large, light-proof  box.  An injured or sick bird should always be kept warm, dry and undisturbed.  The darker the better, so that the bird feels safe and doesn't get stressed or scared which would only add to it's problems.

So, after consultation with my vet, I began feeding him a glucose solution via a crop-tube.  This is just a syringe of liquid attached to a thin, flexible tube which is passed down the throat and into the bird's crop.  This is not difficult to do, but it needs great care as  it is possible to get liquid into the bird's lungs which is obviously extremely dangerous.

I took him to the vet yesterday ( Monday) who checked him over and gave me some antibiotics to administer in the same way. The eye injury would almost certainly mean that he has got some sort of infection.  His mutes ( that is, his droppings) had quite a lot of green in them, which is a sign of intestinal infection.

He is now much stronger and taking an interest in his surroundings.  He is still refusing to eat solid, or even mashed, food, so we are keeping up the crop-tubing.  He seems very tame, but this is actually a bad sign.  A wild bird should be afraid of humans and if it allows itself to be picked up or handled without protest, it means that the bird is ill and/or weak.  

I hope that after the course of antibiotics, he will be able to tackle solid food. Once he can do that, we'll have to decide whether he is fit enough to be released back into the wild. Buzzards are very common around here, and I suppose, realistically, that one more or less would be no great loss. But if you keep birds of prey, there is something very poignant and touching about comparing your fit, healthy, well-fed birds with something as battered and sorry-looking as an injured wild bird.  There is a great desire to bring the wild creature up to the best condition you can.  We'll certainly do the best we can.

I'll post some pictures soon.

Other news from North Devon Hawk Walks.

Last week, I had a couple of people on one of our Bird of Prey Ownership Courses. ( details on www.NorthDevonHawkWalks.co.uk)  This was Greg and his son Laurence.  They'd been thinking about getting a bird of prey for some time and had done a lot of research and preparation.  They met me in Barnstaple, where the Devon Wildlife group had invited me to take part in their annual show,  and  after meeting Lady Macbeth and Cassius decided to invest in a course.

They did very well during the five days of the course and got a load of hands-on experience which will make them more confident and better able to deal with the practicalities of handling, feeding and training a bird of prey.  When there is only a couple of people to deal with, you can cover a lot of ground, and they were able to pack a lot of learning into the five days. Apart from the handling and manning, they tackled imping, coping,casting, using the creance and recovering the bird from a kill.

The only downside was that they were both considerably better than me at pool and thrashed me in our local pub where we went to celebrate the end of the week.   I hadn't played for twenty years, and I was rubbish then too.

Time to feed the buzzard again.