white-tailed kite
These events are a little over a week old, but my LJ has been getting boring for a while, and I want to write this down for my own sake while I still remember it all.
I still do "transports" for the local wildlife rehab organization (taking injured wildlife that people find to the care center when they can't get it there themselves), but things slow down considerably once summer is over, and I hadn't gotten any calls in a while. Two weekends ago, however, I got two calls. The first was on Saturday for an injured crow that had been wandering around a neighborhood for a few days. That call didn't amount to much because I went out to the address, but neither the caller nor I could locate the bird so we gave up after an hour. However on Sunday, I got another call that was much more exciting, for lack of a better word.
The phone rang on Sunday morning, and it was a call from the wildlife rehab hotline, saying that some guys had an injured eagle (!) in a box in their backyard, but they were watching the Chargers game and had been drinking so they couldn't drive it to the care center. The people at the hotline didn't feel comfortable sending a woman out into that kind of situation, so they were trying to find a guy who could take the call. I was very hung over, but I hadn't done any calls in a while and I felt bad after the fruitless search for the crow the day before, so I agreed. I called the people with the bird to get the address and find out that they had also supposedly put a bandage on the bird, and it was now loose in their garage. Considering how much the general public usually seems to know about wildlife (people would routinely bring pigeons to the care center, claiming that they were baby eagles, or bring in baby birds that they had been feeding taco meat in hopes of nursing them back to health), I have to admit to being very skeptical that a) it was actually an eagle, and b) that some guys watching football had managed to bandage it.
I got dressed and drove over to the address that I was given which wasn't in one of the nicer parts of town. When I arrived I was greeted by a a forty-ish balding white guy who with long stringy hair, no shirt or shoes, and tons of really ghetto-looking tattoos. He lead me to the garage where his really drunk/stoned friend was sitting, and at that point I half expected to get jumped or robbed. But sure enough, in the corner behind the car was a large white raptor, which turned out to be a white-tailed kite! I'd never received any training on raptor handling, and had also never transported anything bigger than a pigeon previously, so this was a little intimidating. The bird was on its back, wings spread, and emitting this horrible shriek that I can only describe as soul-piercing. And its eyes. The look in this bird's eyes was one of sheer terror, and it would have been really upsetting to me if I wasn't simultaneously worried about getting eviscerated by the razor-sharp talons and beak of the same bird that those eyes belonged to. I had on some heavy-duty work gloves, although they wouldn't really have been of much help had the bird actually decided to defend itself. Thankfully, we managed to throw a towel over the bird, which it latched on to with its claws, and we were able to kind of guide/slide the bird across the floor into the carrier that I brought. And the craziest thing of all might actually be the fact that these guys had managed to get a bandage, of sorts, onto its wing - why or how, we'll never know. It was a little strip of cloth, tied around the wing at the wrist area, where the bird had been bleeding. All I could figure was that the bird had hit a window or something and had been stunned, so they were able to apply the bandage. Certainly after the fight it put up in the garage, it was evident that it couldn't have been done while the bird was awake in any way, shape, or form. When I got to the care center, the manager on duty gave it a quick once over while moving it to a bigger carrier, and said it seemed like there was only some damage to the wrist, and that the wing didn't look like it was broken, so the bird would hopefully be able to get rehabbed and released.
And as the icing on the cake for this wildlife weekend, my ex had called me while I was out looking for that crow on Saturday to tell me that she'd found a black widow spider on her bathroom floor, and that she had put it in a container. I was skeptical again, but when I went over to her apartment, sure enough there was a mostly dead black widow spider - small-ish, black, shiny, and with a big red hourglass on the abdomen. One thing that's for certain since I've moved out here is that the amount of wildlife experiences and interactions that I've had have far exceeded my expectations. Certainly keeps things interesting.
I still do "transports" for the local wildlife rehab organization (taking injured wildlife that people find to the care center when they can't get it there themselves), but things slow down considerably once summer is over, and I hadn't gotten any calls in a while. Two weekends ago, however, I got two calls. The first was on Saturday for an injured crow that had been wandering around a neighborhood for a few days. That call didn't amount to much because I went out to the address, but neither the caller nor I could locate the bird so we gave up after an hour. However on Sunday, I got another call that was much more exciting, for lack of a better word.
The phone rang on Sunday morning, and it was a call from the wildlife rehab hotline, saying that some guys had an injured eagle (!) in a box in their backyard, but they were watching the Chargers game and had been drinking so they couldn't drive it to the care center. The people at the hotline didn't feel comfortable sending a woman out into that kind of situation, so they were trying to find a guy who could take the call. I was very hung over, but I hadn't done any calls in a while and I felt bad after the fruitless search for the crow the day before, so I agreed. I called the people with the bird to get the address and find out that they had also supposedly put a bandage on the bird, and it was now loose in their garage. Considering how much the general public usually seems to know about wildlife (people would routinely bring pigeons to the care center, claiming that they were baby eagles, or bring in baby birds that they had been feeding taco meat in hopes of nursing them back to health), I have to admit to being very skeptical that a) it was actually an eagle, and b) that some guys watching football had managed to bandage it.
I got dressed and drove over to the address that I was given which wasn't in one of the nicer parts of town. When I arrived I was greeted by a a forty-ish balding white guy who with long stringy hair, no shirt or shoes, and tons of really ghetto-looking tattoos. He lead me to the garage where his really drunk/stoned friend was sitting, and at that point I half expected to get jumped or robbed. But sure enough, in the corner behind the car was a large white raptor, which turned out to be a white-tailed kite! I'd never received any training on raptor handling, and had also never transported anything bigger than a pigeon previously, so this was a little intimidating. The bird was on its back, wings spread, and emitting this horrible shriek that I can only describe as soul-piercing. And its eyes. The look in this bird's eyes was one of sheer terror, and it would have been really upsetting to me if I wasn't simultaneously worried about getting eviscerated by the razor-sharp talons and beak of the same bird that those eyes belonged to. I had on some heavy-duty work gloves, although they wouldn't really have been of much help had the bird actually decided to defend itself. Thankfully, we managed to throw a towel over the bird, which it latched on to with its claws, and we were able to kind of guide/slide the bird across the floor into the carrier that I brought. And the craziest thing of all might actually be the fact that these guys had managed to get a bandage, of sorts, onto its wing - why or how, we'll never know. It was a little strip of cloth, tied around the wing at the wrist area, where the bird had been bleeding. All I could figure was that the bird had hit a window or something and had been stunned, so they were able to apply the bandage. Certainly after the fight it put up in the garage, it was evident that it couldn't have been done while the bird was awake in any way, shape, or form. When I got to the care center, the manager on duty gave it a quick once over while moving it to a bigger carrier, and said it seemed like there was only some damage to the wrist, and that the wing didn't look like it was broken, so the bird would hopefully be able to get rehabbed and released.
And as the icing on the cake for this wildlife weekend, my ex had called me while I was out looking for that crow on Saturday to tell me that she'd found a black widow spider on her bathroom floor, and that she had put it in a container. I was skeptical again, but when I went over to her apartment, sure enough there was a mostly dead black widow spider - small-ish, black, shiny, and with a big red hourglass on the abdomen. One thing that's for certain since I've moved out here is that the amount of wildlife experiences and interactions that I've had have far exceeded my expectations. Certainly keeps things interesting.