The Rhino with Glue-On Shoes (9 page)

I compulsively checked and rechecked the water quality. Sharks and other fishes not only produce huge volumes of fecal matter via the usual route, they also excrete pure ammonia from their gills, which in confined spaces can lethally foul their water. But since the water was sparkling, with no detectable ammonia and a dissolved oxygen (DO) concentration of about 115 percent saturation, we decided to nap in shifts.

Four minutes later Chris shook me awake. “Norton's DO is crashing. It's down to 30 percent; he regurgitated buckets of krill—I can't even see him.” Immediately, we shifted to plan B and added four industrial-grade air stones attached to cylinders of pure oxygen. The DO gradually climbed to 32 percent and on up from there. Like Norton, we all began to breathe a little easier.

Chris surmised correctly that the chunks of semidigested microshrimp had clogged the aeration atomizer. He skillfully and quickly cleaned the pumps, changed the life support filters, and, for good measure, replaced several of the sixty-pound deep-cycle batteries. Norton's tail tip, now slightly protruding out of the water, was still rhythmically pulsing, so we knew he was alive. In a few hours, the water had cleared enough so we could see that his eyes were clear. Surprisingly, he looked BAR (bright, alert, and responsive).And a bar was exactly where I was headed after this was all over.

Now in Atlanta, stranded just a few feet from his new home, Norton was in trouble again. The shark hung somewhere in the opaque, brick-colored water he'd just created. Unable to see if he was still breathing, I felt cold sweat streaming from my forehead. I got a whiff of myself: I reeked more than usual.

I barked to no one in particular, “We're not going to lose this animal, not now. We gotta change his water immediately.”

Several three-inch hoses appeared almost magically and we quickly flushed in clean, well-oxygenated artificial seawater (this was one of the 1,462 potential problems we'd prepared for). I staggered backward. Though this latest crisis had been averted, we'd lost our forward momentum. The jackhammering air compressor was cut off and the boxful of shark and water groaned as it settled on the cracked concrete floor.

After four hours of failed attempts to budge the shark box, someone suggested we try jacking it up with an obviously undersized forklift. At this point, it was worth a try. The fork-lift's engine growled and the tines shrieked as they were wedged under the massive container. As the driver eased back on the lift lever, he yelled, “Okay, everybody get back, this could be dangerous.”

At first, nothing happened except for a lot of ominous cracking and popping. Then the back of the forklift rose swiftly off the ground. This was one of those situations when you don't think, you just do. Ten of us bigger guys scrambled onto the back of the machine behind the driver. Amazingly, the box levered up as the forklift gradually tilted back to the ground. (Relieved, I felt vindicated in my long-held belief that diets were counterproductive; I can only imagine what might have happened to Norton had I curbed my Twinkie intake as so many had foolishly recommended.)

The rest of the move went like clockwork. Only an hour later, a crowd of visitors stood admiring the sharks as they swam calmly in their new Open Ocean home. To a thunderous round of applause, Norton resumed eating, followed soon by Ralph.

For days afterward, I stood at the back of the exhibit gallery assessing the animals' behavior and eavesdropping on our guests.

A little girl would say to her mother: “Mommy, I want to be a marine biologist!”

A little boy would say to his grandfather: “Papa, I love the ocean. And I love Norton.”

Me too, I thought, and
that's
why I do this job.

Patch

by Peter Holz, DVSc, MACVSc

A
s I watched Patch become an ever-smaller speck flying off into the distance, I paused to reflect on his miraculous journey. No doubt it had begun with the screech of tires followed by the inevitable thud and cloud of feathers. Fortunately, someone had found him as he flapped impotently along the roadside, and had the presence of mind to take him to the Healesville Sanctuary veterinary hospital, where he came into my care. The Sanctuary is Australia's largest native fauna park. We do a brisk trade in injured and sick wildlife. That year, 1998, we examined and treated more than fifteen hundred animals that had been smashed by cars, perforated by cats, crunched by dogs, shot, poisoned, and otherwise fallen victim to the planet's current custodians.

My newest patient was a little falcon, also known as a hobby falcon, one of Australia's smallest birds of prey but no less fierce and proud for his lack of size. He regarded me balefully as I wrapped him in a towel and took him into the examination room. The nurse covered his face with a mask connected to the anesthesia machine, and after several rapid breaths our patient was fast asleep. Now I could examine him without stress. Carefully feeling his wings and shoulders for any abnormalities, I felt a crackling high up on the left side of his body near his neck. We took an X-ray of his wings and body to confirm the diagnosis: the hobby had fractured his coracoid.

The coracoid, a bone absent in mammals, sits high up in the shoulder in birds (part of the “wishbone”). It supports the movement of the wings and helps anchor them to the body. The coracoid is frequently broken by a sudden impact, so we see this type of fracture often in birds, especially raptors that feed near roadways. The trouble is that the coracoid lies submerged beneath a huge slab of breast, or pectoral, muscle—the major muscle group required for flight. These muscles attach to the bone, which acts as a brace. If the coracoid is left to heal on its own, the shoulder joint often stiffens and loses its range of motion.

Because repair requires cutting through these muscles, I had always taken the easy way out. Considering surgery too difficult and also too risky, I had treated prior cases conservatively, prescribing cage rest for a month or so instead. A major reason for the Sanctuary's existence is the treatment and eventual release of injured wildlife. When this is not possible, we are legally required to euthanize the animal. This sounds harsh, but wildlife sanctuaries have limited financial resources and space for injured wildlife. Our mandate is to care for those that have a chance to make it back to the wild. Otherwise, we would soon fill up with crippled animals, denying those with a chance for release the space they need.

Euthanasia was the rule rather than the exception with coracoid fractures in hawks or falcons. The birds recovered but they rarely flew well enough for release. Coracoid fractures were a frustrating and depressing injury for our staff.

My heart sank the moment I saw Patch's X-ray. Yet another bird was doomed. There had to be more I could do for these birds than sticking them in a cage and then killing them a month later. Could surgery be an option? After all, what had I—or, more important, the bird—to lose?

Feeling heroic, I decided that this falcon would be the one. He would live or die by the scalpel, instead of rotting in the cage. The raptor keepers took him to heart and had named him “Patch,” after the spot of oddly colored feathers on his chest. This was always a bad omen: naming injured wildlife was an invitation for death to come visit. Just to add to the adrenaline rush, we were in the middle of filming one of those real-life, fly-on-the-wall documentaries. The film crew decided this was an opportunity too good to miss. My first attempt at coracoid surgery would be recorded and shown on national television. The powers that be had already waived their veto rights, allowing the company to film and broadcast anything and everything that they thought would make good TV.

Nowadays it's no big deal to have cameras follow me at work. I operate in a veterinary hospital that exposes every move to the visiting public. But when I took care of Patch, it was all very new and exciting in a terrifying kind of way.

So there I was, with knees trembling and lip wobbling, the bird laid out on the surgery table in front of me, with the skin over his left shoulder area plucked like Sunday's roast chicken to create a sterile field, and the camera perched over my shoulder to capture our triumph or disaster.

The producer wasted no time in taking control of the situation. “Could you move a little to the left, please? You're casting a shadow over the bird. Hold on. Don't start yet, the light isn't right. Could you just put that surgical drape down over the bird again? We'd like to try a different angle this time.” The Australian hobby weighs less than eight ounces and the length of its body from head to tail is about ten inches. The people and camera equipment surrounding me made my patient seem even smaller.

Feeling slightly tense, I made my first cut through the skin beside the breastbone and collarbone, and then tentatively delved into the underlying muscle mass. Blood seeped into the wound, but not as much as I had expected. Wherever possible, I tried to separate, or blunt dissect, the muscle fibers rather than cut through them. An alarmingly large grouping, or plexus, of assorted blood vessels and nerves appeared. Though my surgical instruments were deep in the bird's chest, the hole I had made was tiny, like a keyhole, making my frustratingly thick fingers feel even clumsier than usual. No concert pianists in my family.

I felt around for the fracture ends for what seemed like an eternity, conscious of the camera whirring away. Finally I located one end of the broken bone and inserted a metal rod into its cavity, which I drove up and out through the soft tissue of the shoulder. Lining up this end with the other broken bone end, I reversed the pin and pushed it into the bone. I had to be careful. If I pushed too far I would enter the chest cavity and pierce the bird's heart. That would make exciting television. Fortunately, I managed to align the fracture ends successfully, and the pin sat nicely within the bone.

At this point, our senior raptor keeper asked if I would be cutting off the length of pin, which currently protruded from Patch's shoulder. To relieve the tension, I said flippantly, “No, if we leave it sticking out, it will be easier to catch him when he flies past.” I still wince when I remember hearing myself say that on national television.

All that was left now was to sew up the butchered muscle and skin. This part of the surgery went quickly. Much to my relief, Patch and I both recovered uneventfully from the procedure. We kept the falcon confined in a small cage to give the bone ends time to knit together. During the initial postsurgical period, he received antibiotics and analgesics in his food. Patch's appetite was good and after three weeks we decided to X-ray his shoulder. Though the alignment of the fracture ends was not perfect, the bone had healed. A bird's higher metabolic rate allows fractures to mend much faster than in a mammal. We removed the pin and Patch entered rehab, much like an injured human athlete.

The raptor keepers devised an exercise regime for Patch, gradually increasing his workload over time. He was initially encouraged to take short flights between perches within a room to see if he could actually maintain height. After mastering this simple exercise, he was moved to a larger aviary with a greater distance between perches. While aviary flight gave us some idea of his capabilities, we needed to build up his fitness and see how well he could maneuver in flight. So we placed leather anklets on his legs that were attached to a long line called a creance. The next step was to allow him to fly free.

This stage of rehabilitation for Patch resembled the methods used by falconers to train their birds to hunt pigeons. The keepers used a food-based reward system to encourage him to return, throwing pieces of pigeon into the air so that he was forced to dive, turn, and attack. They would launch Patch into flight and then bring him back with the food. It was important to test his newly healed bone as thoroughly as possible to ensure that it would withstand the rigors of daily flight in the wild. Patch passed all his tests and slowly gained both strength and fitness. The film crew keenly followed his progress.

After more than three months of hard work, we decided Patch was ready to return to the wild. A convoy of excited keepers and the camera crew drove out to the release site, not far from where the falcon was initially found. We bounced along a rough farm track in our four-wheel drives, coming to a halt under a small grove of trees. Patch's box was removed from the back of my vehicle; a radio transmitter was attached to his tail feathers so that we could track his progress. I was given the honor of releasing Patch, cameras buzzing in the background. He glared at me without a hint of gratitude or recognition and I threw him into the overcast sky.

He flew straight as an arrow, rapidly becoming a tiny speck in the distance. Then he disappeared completely. The steady beep from the radio receiver remained the only evidence of his existence.

We tracked Patch daily for the next two weeks and monitored his progress. Sadly, most animals are released back to the wild with no follow-up. Many rehabilitation facilities either don't have the necessary transmitters or lack the staff for extended monitoring. In such cases, no one knows if all the time and effort expended on the animal has paid off. The Sanctuary has made this last step of rehabilitation a priority. We follow all of our raptors postrelease, which has allowed us to gather detailed information showing that many birds do rehabilitate successfully and survive long term.

In Patch's case, the tracking team established that he was hunting and flying normally. But we couldn't be certain that he was catching enough food to maintain his weight. From a distance, birds can appear strong one day, only to die emaciated the next. So after two weeks we decided to capture him for a final examination. Using a Swedish goshawk trap baited with food, we were able to catch the falcon easily without hurting him.

I examined him there in the middle of a field, holding him in a towel. He seemed decidedly put out to be in my hands again and tried unsuccessfully to bite me. Patch had gained weight since release, a sure sign that he was coping well and finding enough of his own food to survive. We removed the radio transmitter and released him back to the wild for the final time. I watched once again as he took to the air, indistinguishable in flight from any other hobby falcon.

Each journey begins with a single step, and Patch's was the first in my coracoid repair journey. Since that day, I have surgically repaired all coracoid fractures and have taught the technique to both students and veterinarians. Not every case has been as spectacularly successful as Patch's. Even so, we now release into the wild over 90 percent of birds presented with coracoid fractures, making it our most successful avian orthopedic procedure.

Despite all the stress and anxiety, the television piece didn't end up looking too bad, either.