Pages

Saturday, October 10, 2009

Saturday with the Birds

It felt great to be back at IBRRC, today, after being out of town last weekend.
This Snowy Egret practically lives at IBRRC waiting for someone to turn his or her back on a bucket of fish. He is pretty good at removing towels from buckets, and just generally waiting for a chance to raid the food cart.

These two Ne Ne's are geese native only to Hawaii. They have been at IBRRC for several months, but can't be placed until the proper permits are obtained. They are doing fine. They are small, somewhat tame, and loveable.

This big Canada Goose is isolated and on a strict diet. His weight ballooned to over 8 kilos, and his feet have open sores from standing out of the water constantly. Today, we put up this barricade to keep him in the water to help his feet heal. We are all rooting for him to become "the biggest loser".

He's back!

This is a Black-bellied Plover. He was taken for release shortly after this picture.

Laura and Gail are putting booties on a fulmar. He had to come in from a pelagic pool, get blow-dried, and will spend the night in a pelagic box which has a soft, mesh bottom. The booties will help keep him from getting foot lesions, since fulmars spend most of their time on or over water.

Booties being expertly fitted. To feed this guy, I needed to use a needle to inject fish with air under their skin so they would float. They are odd birds that look somewhat like gulls, but behave much differently. Well, that's all for today.

3 comments:

Andria said...

What a strange feeding process -- injecting fish with air under their skin?! Was it the skin of his throat, or?...

The ne-nes are very pretty. Were they surrendered by someone who owned them?

Bob said...

Air is injected under the fish's skin along it's side until you see some swelling. This keeps the fish floating on the surface as fulmars don't dive. They don't seem to eat out of the fish baskets either. I think the Ne Ne's were left in a park by someone, if I remember correctly. Jay, our director, is trying to adopt them.

Andria said...

Ohhhhh...... ha. When you wrote, "I needed to inject fish with air under their skin," I thought "their" referred to the birds....that you somehow injected pureed fish under the BIRD's skin. This makes much more sense!!!