The injured sea gull Keith and I rescued yesterday survived the night. This morning it was resting peacefully, but bright eyed and alert. I fed it a mixture of whole grain bread and water. Like last night, it first attacked the spoon. Once it figured out the spoon had food on it, it ate on its own.
The gull is still frightened, but starting to show signs of becoming accustomed to us being around it. My only concern is that although it is trying to eat, it eats very little. If it doesn’t gain its appetite back, it’ll surely weaken and die.
When we got to work, today, Keith hit me with the first bit of bad news. He asked the head nurse where he works how we could get the bone set back in and to get it to stay there so it could heal. Her response was that the bird was in a lot of pain, and, by the description of the injury, the wing may need to be amputated. If we let it heal as is, the protruding bone would always be prone to infection and the bird would always be in a lot of pain - even if it didn’t show signs of it. If we couldn’t afford a veterinarian to fix it, we would do the bird a great favor by putting it to sleep.
I had held out for the possibility that we could set the wing ourselves, but this news disheartened us both.
About a half hour after Keith delivered that news, a veterinarian in Cambridge returned my call. The good news is she will fix the bird for us and allow us to take it home and nurse it back to health. The better news is she will do it at no charge.
A glimmer of hope lies on the horizon for our injured sea gull.
Our biggest concern now is that it has survived the day and will survive the night until we can get it to the vet seven tomorrow morning. The hardest thing is sitting at work wondering if the bird is still alive. We’ll find out when we get home around nine this evening.
I figure if it is still acting as it did this morning, it should make it through the night. Hopefully, after a trip to the vet, it’ll feel less pain, gain its strength back, and eventually be set free again.
That is if its wing doesn’t need to be amputated. If that is what’s needed, it will have a quiet, but safe life on our eight acres in the Toddville Tidewaters.
© 2006
Mark Darien
All rights reserved
Please include this copyright notice if you share this article
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment