The need to travel light means Laurin has to do laundry every three days or so – and that’s the best opportunity for her to find time to bring me up to date on what she’s doing. ( I’m just glad that this time I wasn’t trying to cook rice, so I couldn’t forget it again and ruin another pot….) So she called Friday evening, the 3rd, actually rather late and we didn’t get off the phone til about 11:30 her time.
She’s still in Pensacola, the ‘forgotten facility,’ as she calls it. They’ve gotten two more IBRRC staff people to help and are now caught up on paperwork, weighing, and bleeding for evaluations. She was delighted to see the new folks, and knew both of them from ‘Fish Camp’ – as the house where she stayed in Louisiana was called (it gets rented out to deep sea fishing parties under normal circumstances). But the facility is still badly lacking in supplies.
They’ve got only a few net-bottom pens and hospital cages, though more are made just waiting for the netting. They have one pair of forceps, no tongs, and are feeding birds with chopsticks gotten from the Thai restaurant next door. They just got a dry-erase board on which to write out daily chores – before that they were writing on cardboard boxes and using a different box each day. They had run out of Sporanox – liquid itraconazole that is essential for the prophylaxis and treatment of aspergillosis, a fungal disease to which stressed seabirds are prone – until the two new folks arrived with a few bottles. And yet there are stacks of the netting, unused, at Lake Jackson, and shelves of office supplies in the break room. In Pensacola, they have safety glasses but no face masks to protect them from stabbing beaks – but there’s a box of unused face shields in Lake Jackson.
They DID receive several cases of Pepto-Bismol and Laurin had no clue why (thinking it might have something to do with the yellow mayonnaise on recent sandwich orders!), until I told her I’d seen a video where it was shown being tubed to the birds to prevent absorption in the stomachs of the oil they had preened from their feathers. But the Pensacola facility strikes Laurin as the bird version of M*A*S*H, with everything from writing pens (the kind that can keep the ink flowing to the tip even when vertical, as they jot things on the charts clipped to the pens full of birds) to medications in short supply. For BP to pay for anything involves a lengthy requisition process, with multiple authorizations along the way. If purchased outright and receipts submitted, reimbursement is very unlikely. Although IBRRC has been willing to put their own resources out there, Tri-State is not – and Tri-State is running the Pensacola facility.
Laurin plans to suggest she take her allotted day off, the ‘day off’ vehicle, and drive to Lake Jackson to load up on supplies. It’s a four hour trip each way, but she loves road trips! And it’s through some interesting country.
The Pensacola facility is also short on water… they were supposed to get hooked up directly to a fire hydrant today, but it didn’t happen. Right now, you can’t fill a pen, wash a bird and flush the toilet at the same time – two out of three, maybe, if you’re careful! Water is coming in through a very small line and just isn’t sufficient. She hopes they don’t have to wait til Tuesday to get access to the fire hydrant water and its water pressure.
The facility gets a few intakes every day – and they recently got their first raptor: an osprey. Unfortunately, oil wasn’t his primary problem, but fishing line had been wrapped for so long and so deeply around the toes on one foot, that one toe was nearly severed and he’d lost the use of another, plus a deep gash on the leg had exposed and dried out a tendon. Laurin was called in to help assess, but the facility has to operate on a triage basis, and they all agreed this bird needed to be euthanized. His chances were poor for a return to function; it would have been a lengthy, stressful process (osprey are notoriously difficult to get to eat in captivity); and they have to think of all the other birds who need their care, time, space, and food, with a better chance of release.
Osprey
The gannets coming in are already in bad shape, for some unknown reason. Two of the people working in husbandry in Pensacola are DART (Disaster Animal Response Team) volunteers, who are from Suncoast Seabird Sanctuary in the Tampa Bay area of Florida. They say they’ve been seeing similar problems with the non-oiled gannets in their area. The gannets in Pensacola are mostly only slightly oiled, maybe a ‘bathtub ring’ or even get some oil on them after intake, but they are coming in unhealthy, with low blood values that show poor overall condition.
Gannet preening
The weaker gannets are hard to feed. Fish can be tossed to the stronger ones, but the weaker ones need to have a fish put half-way down their throat, which they then swallow, or they need to actually be force-fed. Today the staff came up with a ‘pool feeding’ protocol: 3-5 times a day, the birds in each pen are moved to an inside small pool where they happily splash around gobbling fish thrown in. But they need more pools, which means more water.
Reporting back on two birds mentioned in the last blog, they did lose the green heron, but the Canada goose with the chemical burns is improving. Something else is wrong, though, and she’s scheduled for a neurological exam.
They are seeing a lot of Common loons, which are very fragile, apparently, and they lost one Saturday right after the bath. The co-worker who does contract work for Tri-State told Laurin that a spill she worked in Boston some years ago, which was mostly loons, had only a 3% release rate. They have one scoter, which went through the bath, seemed fine, was placed outside, and then they nearly lost him to hypothermia as he was not waterproof and he got wet to the skin from the rain. He has bounced back after warming and fluids. They also washed a great blue heron that was strong and healthy. The bird had apparently waded through oil and then, in tucking those long legs up, had contaminated his lower feathers. Laurin has never handled a great blue heron without a face mask – that impressive bill is the first thing you see, thrusting out of the pen at anyone who disturbs him – but she managed to throw a sheet over it, grab the back of the neck and pick the whole bird up. Getting control of the head is a must! The bird did well in the bath.
Weather reports show daily thunder storms for most of the Gulf coast – but Laurin doesn’t see outside from about 6:30 am (except for occasional smoke breaks) til she leaves for the hotel, since she’s not in husbandry and caring for the cleaned birds in the outside aviaries. She has heard it rain, she says, but it wasn’t raining the few times she was outside today.
Sleep deprivation is beginning to catch up with her, as well as the constant humidity and heat. Her skin is breaking out and she doesn’t take her scarves off her head all day – she battles with her corkscrew curls even here – but I’ve told her she is not allowed to go back to dreadlocks! She has a roommate now, but it’s someone who’s not anxious to work the longer hours required in this response center, so Laurin is going to see if that can change. Staying late is not a problem for Laurin, if she can get a ride back to the hotel. Luckily, her room is right next to the laundry the hotel provides for guests, so she can relax, check in with me, and wait for her clean clothes.
Saturday was a bad day for direct poop hits, from both a gannet and a loon, and she ends up standing in line at Subway or the grocery store looking like a creature from the lagoon…with safety glasses forgotten on top of her head, poop stains, and an overall smell of fish (she assumes – but she has lost her ability to smell it). She has a hard time remembering what happened on what day. She continues to care deeply about what happens to each bird, but understands that herd health and triage sometimes require decisions we wouldn’t have to make in a non-crisis rehabilitation situation . And she’s still loving it!
Louise Shimmel
PS For photos of the rescue efforts and bird operations in the Gulf, check out IBRRC’s facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/eRaptors#!/ibrrc
