From Sheida Soleimani
One of the questions we get asked all the time is whether we name our patients.
The answer is no. They're wild animals, and it's important to us that we treat them as such while they're in our care. But every now and then, a bird's history earns them an unofficial nickname.
This little Cooper's Hawk became "Plastic Eater."
When I got a call a few weeks ago about a "hawk ripping apart a tarp and eating it," my first thought was that he was starving-and I was right.
When I arrived, the poor little guy was repeatedly chasing a blue tarp blowing in the wind, pinning it down with his talons, and tearing it apart. His mouth and crop were packed with bits of blue plastic. He was so emaciated that his keel bone was jutting sharply from his chest.
After cleaning him up (he was carrying more flat flies than I think I've ever seen on a single bird), getting fluids into him, and settling him into a heated enclosure, I came back an hour later to find that he had shredded the puppy pad beneath his perch and was trying to eat that, too.
Fabric pads it was.
Thankfully, this little freak has since realized that actual food tastes much better than synthetic materials. He's eating well, gaining weight, and acting much more like the Cooper's Hawk he was always supposed to be.
I suspect he was one of those youngsters that simply didn't make the cut-that his parents stopped feeding him before he had the skills to survive on his own.
One of the interesting things about wildlife rehabilitation is that not every patient is here because of human-caused injury. Alongside birds struck by windows, poisoned by rodenticides, tangled in fishing line, or burned by fireworks, we also care for the ones that simply wouldn't have survived their first year.
Nature can be unforgiving. But when we have the opportunity to give one of those birds a second chance-to give them the time they need to grow into the wild animal they were meant to become-I think it's worth doing. With so many bird populations in steep decline, every individual that makes it back into the wild matters, even if, by nature's standards, they weren't originally meant to.
2 Comments
gsdsam@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 3 pts · 11d
In your experience - do animals like this, who have been rejected, end up getting training at the rehab centre on how to survive or how do you set them up for success on release?
anon6789@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 11d
You guys have been asking some great questions recently!
In many cases there is absolutely nothing wrong with the rejected offspring, it is just bad luck.
Surviving in the wild is essentially a game of resource management: one needs to end up net positive on calories to make sure they see another day.
Many birds, like our raptor friend here, are hatched asynchronously, one will hatch, and a day or so later, the next, and so on. This is thought to be an insurance policy of sorts. Raptors typically lay few eggs, sometimes only 1 or 2, because ecosystems can only support so many predators. In good food years, they can tend to lay more eggs.
By having staggered children, it gives the parents the opportunity to select who these limited calories go to. If hunting is good, the biggest baby will be full and there will be some left over for a smaller offspring. Conversely, if hunting is poor, the smaller has less physical ability to deny the larger (closer to successfully raised) offspring. But if the older ends up with some type of health issue or a baby or 2 gets eaten, etc, there are backups. All this nesting, hunting, defending, and stockpiling food is very costly to the parents and they want to see something pay off for all their sacrifice.
At some point, the parents may remove the smallest from the nest altogether, or it gets knocked out by a sibling. Again, not anything wrong with it necessarily, it just hasn't been growing fast enough with the resources available. It's sacrificed for the overall success of the breeding season.
If someone finds this discarded baby and gets it proper care, there's no reason it can't grow up perfectly fine, with no issues.
Here's a writeup I really like on asynchronous vs synchronous hatching and why different birds do what they do.
It's not just birds that do this either. Opossums normally have around 6 babies, but they can have up to 20. The problem is momma opossum only has 13 tests, and the babies can't share. Once they latch on, their skulls will literally mold around the nipple so they stay physically latched! This is why if you find a hit opossum with babies, you should never ever try to remove the babies! Take the whole mother to a rehabber and they will deal with it. If you try to remove the babies, you will likely pull their jaw off! But for those last 7 babies that aren't strong enough to be the first to attach, they are sadly out of luck.
In gardening, we often do the same. We will plant a couple seeds in one spot, and then of the ones that sprout, we pluck the weak shoots and leave the strongest one to grow. It's pretty much the same thing. They're not defective, we just had to pick a victor early on.
Rehabbed animals get evaluated for their hunting abilities before they will be released. It's almost as labor intensive for us as it is for wild parents, so we want all our sweat equity to pay off with healthy babies that will thrive on their own, just as their wild parents would have wanted!