Texas Update 1 - This Week at the Rescue

This week: I held the still-warm heart of a horse, dosed out my first meds, practiced injections on a recently deceased raccoon and juvenile red-tailed hawk, tube-fed an inca dove, gave subcutaneous fluids to a pigeon (remembering to get negative pressure on the syringe – the air sacs are dangerously close to the insertion for fluids), helped wean a piglet named Jelly Bean, was bitten by a shoveler duck,was hissed at by an Egyptian Goose, fake-swam a dead fish to entice a spiny turtle to eat (convincingly, I thought, although the turtle was skeptical), held open the beak of a screech owl with a broken wing for delivery of a controlled pain drug, hand-fed a juvenile pigeon from a device made out of medical tape and a small empty bottle that mimics a parental crop, cut up an earthworm for a box turtle with a malformed jaw, saw a recently electrocuted pigeon with fried tail feathers, watched syringe-feeding of tiny squirrels with closed eyes who knead at the air as they suckle, gave eye drops to a grackle (who, let me tell you what, did not love the idea), accidentally let a bird (okay, two) out of their enclosures and had to recapture them (a knack one develops quickly), then had a second day in the bird room with no escapes at all, caged a hummingbird in my fingers to get a correct weight and felt the hovering beating of her wings, frantic but harmless, watched the Superbowl at a bar called The Dog and Pony (thank god for cheesy nachos after working your third 12-14 hour day in a row), prepared diet buckets for capuchins, spider monkeys, rhesus monkeys, and lemurs, watched a cat with a burned leg and a fawn hit by a car go under anesthesia, met a boa constrictor, a fennec fox, and a cedar waxwing, and listened to the first Texas rain, a welcome sound in a drought on a tin roof. And that’s just part of the highlight reel.