ARCAS Part 2 - Birds
Hitchcock had it right - Birds are mean. You'd come to that conclusion pretty quickly too, if only you had to spend your whole day navigating in a cage with dozens of screaming Green Parakeets that aim their hooky beaks at your fingertips and hungry Toucans that mistake your head for a ripe mango. In fact, it is not as much as they are mistaking it, and more like trying it out for firmness and breakability. Toucans are carnivores; besides the occasional fruit, their favorite dish in the jungle is other birds' eggs left unattended. Here, in ARCAS, soy is part of their diet, and when they tire of that - dog biscuits. Their beak is virtually weightless, but hard and sharp with serrated edges. A pretty bird, no argument there, but a vicious one as well.
An operation to splint a Toucan's broken leg
The Patient
The Fracture
Splinting with a plastic syringe cut down to size
The Cast (medical tape)
In ICU, still under anesthesia
Recovery "Room"
These big guys everybody around here calls Turkeys. Their real name is Curassow, but volunteers don't like them, and it's a shame, but I love their hunchbacked yellow noses. They are big and annoying, I get it. And it doesn't make it better that they are always in the same cage as the Chachalaca which is a smaller brown bird that for some reason finds nothing better to do but to land on the head of the person cleaning, or bringing the food, and check if by any chance they might have something to eat in their ears, eyes, and nose.
Chachalaca
Birds are mean, but people are meaner. My neighbor in Brooklyn had a parakeet, and I haven't once before thought about how that sweet old lady might come by this bird. Parakeets come to ARCAS by the dozens, and if they are young enough to rehabilitate, the process is long and painful. First thing poachers do to parakeets when they catch them is to trim their wings so they can't fly. That is before they put them in small boxes and ship them to their destinations, to which only one out of eight arrive alive. To the poachers, the deal might seem well worth it. On the black market a Guacamaya (Scarlet Macaw) is worth $5,000 or more.
In rehabilitation the idea is to give a fair chance to every bird, and this means helping them grow back their feathers. It sounds like all a recovering bird would need is some food and maybe R&R, right? Wrong. In order for the wing feathers to be grown out equally, an ARCAS vet must pluck out every harmed feather from the juvenile loro's wings so it would have any chance of flying high ever again. The younger the loro, the more difficult is the process. Up until a certain age a loro's feathers are directly connected to some of its veins, and plucking those feathers would result in it dieing from blood loss.
Autopsy of a green loro that died from gastric obstruction
An operation to splint a Toucan's broken leg
The Patient
The Fracture
Splinting with a plastic syringe cut down to size
The Cast (medical tape)
In ICU, still under anesthesia
Recovery "Room"
These big guys everybody around here calls Turkeys. Their real name is Curassow, but volunteers don't like them, and it's a shame, but I love their hunchbacked yellow noses. They are big and annoying, I get it. And it doesn't make it better that they are always in the same cage as the Chachalaca which is a smaller brown bird that for some reason finds nothing better to do but to land on the head of the person cleaning, or bringing the food, and check if by any chance they might have something to eat in their ears, eyes, and nose.
Chachalaca
Birds are mean, but people are meaner. My neighbor in Brooklyn had a parakeet, and I haven't once before thought about how that sweet old lady might come by this bird. Parakeets come to ARCAS by the dozens, and if they are young enough to rehabilitate, the process is long and painful. First thing poachers do to parakeets when they catch them is to trim their wings so they can't fly. That is before they put them in small boxes and ship them to their destinations, to which only one out of eight arrive alive. To the poachers, the deal might seem well worth it. On the black market a Guacamaya (Scarlet Macaw) is worth $5,000 or more.
In rehabilitation the idea is to give a fair chance to every bird, and this means helping them grow back their feathers. It sounds like all a recovering bird would need is some food and maybe R&R, right? Wrong. In order for the wing feathers to be grown out equally, an ARCAS vet must pluck out every harmed feather from the juvenile loro's wings so it would have any chance of flying high ever again. The younger the loro, the more difficult is the process. Up until a certain age a loro's feathers are directly connected to some of its veins, and plucking those feathers would result in it dieing from blood loss.
Autopsy of a green loro that died from gastric obstruction