Last fall, one of our volunteers who helps rescue swans emailed me a picture of damaged swan feathers, and explained they were seeing more and more of this particular type of feather damage. Severely affected birds were not “water-proofed” and thus would simply sink in the water or succumb to hypothermia.

I had never heard of this before-so I did what anyone would do: I Googled it.  After an hour of sifting through websites and message boards, I happened upon information about a disease termed “Pink Feather Syndrome.”

Around 2005,  mute swans in the UK belonging to Queen Elizabeth II began getting sick and showing a peculiar clinical sign: Their feathers were turning pink.  The Regal Swan, a Florida-based research organization, spent two years sampling and testing, and finally have discovered that Pink Feather Disease is caused by a previously un-named bacterium.  They are currently trying to DNA sequence it to classify it.  This novel bacteria have been found on egrets, ibises, swans and white pelicans.

Here is what Pink Feather looks like on a Trumpeter Swan’s wing feathers:

I emailed The Regal Swan and five minutes later, two researchers from the organization had called me, explained what they knew about Pink Feather Syndrome, how to treat it (baths with Dawn dishsoap) and promptly requested we mail them some feather samples from any swans that came in exhibiting these feather issues.

Now, several months later, Pink Feather Syndrome has been diagnosed in some Minnesota Swans and WRC continues to send samples from infected swans to them to help further their research. The samples are taken from damaged feathers, so as to not damage to healthy feathers, and involves snipping off the tips of the damaged feathers. Here’s a better look at how feathers with the bacteria on them look compared to healthy feathers. Note that this is on the same bird:

The Regal Swan is also looking into the possibility of this bacterium damaging colored feathers as well. Here I am collecting feathers from a Lesser Scaup that was humanely euthanized due to severe body trauma:

There is much about this syndrome that we don’t know yet, but The Regal Swan is doing everything they can to continue the research and help save these birds.

Providing important samples like this to help further research into wildlife diseases is an important role that we play as one of the nation’s busiest wildlife hospitals. It’s exciting and rewarding to be part of such a collective effort.

To learn more about the Regal Swan and their work, visit their Kickstarter page which has a video on it.

Last fall there were a number of American White Pelicans that were too young to migrate.  We were able to release most of them into migrating flocks in southern Minnesota before they left, but this one didn’t mature fast enough and stayed with us through the winter.  Luckily,  while this individual is still wild, it is tolerating us and not getting too stressed out being here.

We don’t like to overwinter animals. Being with us, even if they tolerate us, is stressful and housing in captivity can cause problems.  This pelican developed a toe infection that could be from the type of flooring we have or its depressed immunity from being stressed or some trauma occurred trying to evade us, or simply a combination of several factors.

In this picture, Vet Leslie is sizing a cushioned shoe that the pelican will wear to protect the surgery site.  Below is a picture of the toe right after surgery.

And above is the toe after it has healed!

The toe infection required amputation of just the end of the toe; the surgery went fine and after several weeks of bandage changes, wearing a cushioned shoe and medications, we’re happy to say the pelican is as good as new!

Except it’s in full body molt right now.  If we released it in this state, a light rain would soak the pelican to the bone and likely cause hypothermia.  So as it warms up or its new feathers grow in (whichever comes first), we’ll release it into a flock of pelicans.

In the meantime, the volunteers get a kick out of feeding the pelican every day.  You can see in this video, that it definitely knows when feeding time is!

(Note that Amer. White Pelicans do not dive into the water after fish like Brown Pelicans. They swim and herd fish as a group then skim them out of the water, exactly like this one is doing in the video. You can really see how its pouch expands in the water and then how it strains the excess water out through the captured fish. This small pool is the pelican’s “feeding” pool. It has a much larger pool to swim in as well.)

I know this is an old story, and I probably sound like a broken record, but facing this problem every day has left me fatigued; hopefully, this post will be cathartic and result in even a few more people becoming aware of this problem.

A few weeks ago, we admitted several Canada Geese that were found weak in the same area in North Mankato.  Along with these geese were several dead ones, all in the same area.

After exams and tests, we found that all the geese had lead toxicity.  Radiographs (x-rays) revealed tiny lead shot in all of their ventriculi (gizzards or stomachs).  The radiograph below of one of these geese shows the tiny pellets in its system (they’re the brighter white round balls):

Below is a close-up of the lead

This radiograph is odd because there are so many, uniform lead pellets in the stomach of these geese.  One might think this is because hunting season recently finished and these geese have been shot; however, these metal pieces are in the gastrointestinal (GI) tract of the geese, meaning they had to eat it.  If the geese had been shot, we would see metal shot in the muscles, bones, etc, but not this many in the GI tract.  Also, lead only causes toxicity when it is in the GI tract because the stomach acids break it down and then it is absorbed.  Lead shot lodged in a muscle or other tissue doesn’t cause lead toxicity because it doesn’t break down and enter the blood system.

To illustrate the uniqueness of these radiographs,  check out the one below of a Trumpeter Swan we admitted last month with lead toxicity.

The metal in this radiograph is definitely not uniform!  And check out the close-up of the metal below.

You can almost make out bent hooks, large sinkers and even a small spinner!

We admit >30 swans each fall/winter, and almost all have lead toxicity.  Trumpeter Swans ingest lead fishing tackle  and shot that they see at the bottom of bodies of water when they have to forage in shallow areas  for food.   Typically, they eat aquatic vegetation, some insects and have even been seen eating fish when vegetation is low.  During the winter, when all the vegetation is gone, they end up looking on the bottom of lakes and rivers.  If that body of water has been fished in, there is lead tackle sitting on the bottom.  The swans see something shiny, mistake it for a minnow and eat it.

They also ingest small pebbles, or grit, to help their gizzards perform correctly. When they’re picking up small pebbles on the bottoms of the lakes and rivers, if pellets are present they just get ingested with everything else.

Canada Geese, however, are grazers.  They typically eat grass and other greens found on land/shoreline.  So how were these geese eating so many uniform lead shot?  Was someone poisoning them? Did some shot accidentally get dumped outside? I was thoroughly confused until a former conservation officer mentioned how the waves on a river/lake can wash spent shot up on the shoreline into piles.  Sure enough, check out the image below that I found online:

LEAD SHOT IN A HEAVILY USED TRAP RANGE FALL ZONE (courtesy of Nebraskalandmagazine.com http://outdoornebraska.ne.gov/blogs/2010/08/toxic-game-part-ii/)

Even though it is illegal to hunt waterfowl with lead shot, some people still do. Lead shot is still often used to shoot clay pigeons at shooting ranges, which is legal.  The shot accumulates at these areas in such a concentration that any animal that grazes could accidentally eat enough to cause toxicity.

To treat our geese, we flushed the lead out of their gizzards and found not only were they impacted with grass but also sand. Geese and other birds who graze use rocks and sand to help grind the greens up in their gizzard.  These geese were probably grazing on a shore line or shooting range and accidentally ingested the lead shot, mistaking it for a small rock.

Watching almost a dozen of these geese, >30 swans each winter and hearing about the dozens of bald eagles admitted each year to The Raptor Center with lead toxicity makes me wonder why it is still legal to use lead fishing tackle and lead ammunition? Fortunately, our state DNR is also concerned and is working with retailers to encourage hunters to switch to non-lead bullets. Here’s an article about the plight of Bald Eagles.

So what can you do? You can help spread the word by sharing this post via Facebook and Twitter.

Have a conversation with family and friends who hunt and fish. Ask them to use non-lead alternatives or better yet: give them the gift of non-lead items for birthdays, holidays or to celebrate the opening of the various sporting seasons.

Here’s more information on these alternatives:

Deer hunters can easily switch to copper and steel ammunition. And, in fact, copper ammunition is actually more accurate and it penetrates better than standard lead bullets. Here’s an article from WCCO on this option.

Unsure where to get non-lead ammunition? The bottom of this website has several manufacturers listed, and a simple Google search of  non-lead ammunition yields hundreds of results.

If you fish, non-lead fishing sinkers are available alongside the lead fishing sinkers at your local sporting goods store for only pennies more.

More information regarding lead toxicity in Minnesota wildlife can be found on the MNDNR website.

It is only appropriate that our 8900th patient of 2012 be an American Crow! We admitted more crows last year than any other year in history, primarily due to a heavy West Nile Virus summer.

This crow was very lucky to have been spotted and saved! A citizen saw the bird hanging from a tree and notified the police. Anoka County Parks Ranger Kris Shields responded to the call and with the help of others was safely able to obtain the bird, which was hanging from the tree by what appeared to be fishing line wrapped around its wing.

On physical exam, the line was found to be tightly wound around the tips of some flight feathers on the left wing. Some mild swelling was felt over the left shoulder, so the bird may have injured it as he/she was hanging and likely struggling. The crow was started on some anti-inflammatories and prescribed cage rest.

Now, one week later, the crow is doing very well in its flight room and will be released some time in the next week.

It was a long summer dealing with the 100+ crows that were admitted with symptoms consistent with West Nile Virus (WNV) infection.  Trying to process all of the new information and research on the virus during the peak of the rehab season was incredibly challenging.

That combined with an abundant lack of information about WNV and crows, and that fact that there is no treatment for birds with WNV, led to a very stressful and sad summer for our medical staff as we watched more than 100 crows die.  Here’s a brief recap of how WNV impacted crows at WRC this year and what we learned:

• July – September (which is when WNV infection rates peak each year) we admitted 150+ American Crows; last year during the same time period we admitted < 50 crows.
• Over the last 12 years, WRC’s crow admission rate during this time period mimics the mosquito and human WNV infection rate in the Twin Cities (information compared to information on ArboNet by the CDC/USGS http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/dvbid/westnile/usgs_frame.html ).  This implies that the majority of crows admitted during this time period are likely to have WNV.
• We did complete blood counts on many of these crows to see if we could help diagnose WNV infection on admission.  We found that WNV-infected crows had an increased level in heterophils (immune cells that respond to acute infection ) and a decreased number of eosinophils (immune cells that usually respond to allergic reactions and parasites), however, these are trends and do not diagnose WNV infection.  Instead, they must be used like a piece of the puzzle when looking at a crow that might have WNV.
• While some testing is available, it is expensive, slow and often doesn’t give a definitive answer.  We were unsuccessful in finding a test kit that we could purchase for use at the Center.
• Of the 150 crows admitted, 106 of them had clinical signs consistent with WNV AND either tested positive or died within a few days of admit.  Of the 106, 102 died and four survived (2 who had WNV and 2 who didn’t have WNV).
• No rehabilitated WNV-infected crow has been reported to survive and then be released. WRC has released one positive WNV-infected crow and expects to release another in a few months (it’s in the process of regrowing feathers). Watch a video of one of the recovered crows as Vet Renee does a final exam in its flight cage.
  

The numbers are sobering: This year, there were only four crows that survived out of 106 that presented signs of WNV; that’s a 2% survival rate.  So the question becomes, how do we reduce suffering while still finding a way to provide care for these crows?

We ask ourselves this question every day; we never stop thinking about the individual and treat every animal with the compassion and respect it deserves. It’s one of the toughest decisions we make as medical professionals in wildlife rehabilitation: If there is no treatment and an animal is suffering with slim chances for survival, when is euthanasia the kindest option?

West Nile Virus (WNV) crept up this year and hit our American Crow population hard.  So far, we’ve admitted 100 more crows than we admitted last year–and almost all of these extra crows were suspected of having West Nile Virus.

The word “suspect” is  key here. The problem is that all of the symptoms that our suspect crows exhibited (weakness, unbalanced, etc) are very vague.  Things like head trauma, toxicity and starvation can present exactly like a crow infected with WNV.   When a crow comes in unbalanced and weak, how am I supposed to know it has WNV?

As explained in previous posts, I had learned that the in-house test for WNV was no longer being made.  After some more research I found another test; this one could be performed in-house, however, it required the clinic to purchase a machine and supplies–this would likely greatly exceed what we could afford.  I emailed the company anyway (and have yet to hear back from them…).

I then emailed and called around to the University of Minnesota’s College of Veterinary Medicine Diagnostic Lab, the MN Zoo, the MN Department of Public Health, and several wildlife veterinarian colleagues in other states.  I was eventually referred to Metropolitan Mosquito Control who owned the machine to do in-house WNV testing.

Unfortunately, they had tested all the birds that they had allocated for the season so they would not test any of our crows.  I found an out-of-state diagnostic laboratory that would run antibody titers on crows for WNV.  This was great news, however, a titer only tells if an animal was exposed to WNV (not currently infected); also, this specific titer only detected the first few days of infection, meaning the test could come back “negative” and the patient could still have WNV  (many of our crows came in having been infected a week earlier).

This test also was costly and we wouldn’t get the results back for a week (up to this point, most crows had been dying 1-2 days after admit). What’s the point of doing this test when we wouldn’t get the results until after the patient had already died?

We were out of options and tired of watching crows die.  We began sending out this test, despite the futility, but we also began doing an in-house blood exam (counting the different types of blood and immune cells) to see if we could see a trend in the WNV positive birds.

We also began researching different treatment options for WNV and started suspect birds on a large regimen of different treatments for supportive care and secondary infections.  And then we waited, again…

I’ve probably posted about this before, but every time an animal comes in stuck to a glue trap, it makes me sad.

Glue traps are marketed as an efficient, cheap and humane way to kill rodents, but there is nothing humane about causing an animal to starve/dehydrate to death while struggling to free themselves from the glue trap.  Many times, rodents will try to chew their limbs off in desperation to escape.

When these animals come in, I immediately anesthetize them with gas anesthesia.  The picture below is a House Mouse that was admitted this morning under anesthesia (I didn’t want to take the time to photograph it before anesthetizing it; besides, there are plenty of videos on YouTube of live rodents stuck to glue traps if you want to see first-hand how stressed these animals are).

Once anesthetized, I used vegetable oil to eliminate the stickiness from the glue trap.  The mouse came off easily.

Ideally, the animal would then get a bath with Dawn dishsoap to remove the oil, but this little mouse was too unstable for any more anesthesia.  Here’s a picture of it recovering.

It’s awake, but pretty stressed from the ordeal.  We gave it an anti-inflammatory medication and a quiet, warm enclosure to rest in.

These traps are incredibly inhumane and unnecessary.  The animal can NOT remove itself from the trap; it will violently struggle and struggle until it dies.  After we removed and treated the mouse, we used the half of the glue trap that wasn’t covered in oil to demonstrate the strength of the adhesive.  As you can see from the picture below (a visiting veterinary student from Sweden, Maja-Lisa, is demonstrating), just half of the glue trap is able to hold an almost full gallon of water with no problem.

Another horrific thing about glue traps is they get stuck to ANYTHING (not just rodents).  We see just as many “non-target” species as we do rodents on glue traps.  The pictures below is a sparrow (they eat off the ground, too). Last summer we admitted five big brown bats stuck to two different glue traps. Unfortunately the bats had struggled so much they had torn their wing webbing and broken their delicate wing bones; they all had to be euthanized.

If you do have a rodent problem, please, don’t use these glue traps.  There are inexpensive metal live traps that you can purchase at any hardware store. The best part? It’s incredibly easy to release the mice from these traps and there’s no mess that you have with traditional mousetraps. Even standard snap traps are much more accurate and humane (causing death in less than a second).  But remember: You need to block off/fix how the rodents are getting into your house, otherwise it’ll be an ongoing battle.

As described in my last post, West Nile Virus (WNV) was extremely prevalent this summer, and WRC was receiving several crows each day who had symptoms of WNV. The problem was differentiating WNV (which is likely not treatable in crows) from many other diseases (which are treatable). Here’s a brief video of a crow presenting imbalance and weakness in its legs, symptomatic of WNV. You can see by the video how subtle, and possibly indicative of other issues, the symptoms are.

A few weeks went by, August was creeping in, and I was starting to suffer from compassion fatigue.  We would admit several crows a day with these vague symptoms, put them on supportive care (there isn’t much else you can do for any of the possible diagnoses), and over the next few days watch them continue to weaken and die.  All the literature from the first strain of WNV in New York (WNV ’99) talked about a 100% fatality rate for American Crows.

I believe that my job is to minimize patient suffering.  If these crows have WNV and are just going to die, I would rather humanely euthanize them on admission than have them suffer and slowly die.  If we could diagnose them as truly having WNV on admission, then we could prevent prolonged suffering.

It was still our busy season at this point, but when I wasn’t admitting the 50+animals/day, rechecking the 100+  in-care patients, or answering questions from our veterinary students, veterinary technician students or the hundreds of volunteers that help us care for these animals, I could be found on the computer, searching for an in-house WNV diagnostic test we could afford.  Finally, I found a test called the “VecTest” that we could do in-house.  The only problem was the price, so two days later I brought it to the rest of the staff of WRC: Could we justify the cost of the test to diagnose WNV on admit?  The answer was a unanimous, yes!  So I left the meeting and immediately ordered the test online.

That weekend was loooooonng.  We admitted another six unbalanced, weak crows per day, and I continued to treat them, waiting impatiently for the test to arrive.

That Monday I called the distributor to see what the delay was – we hadn’t received the tests yet.  Three phone calls and 2 hours later I found out that the manufacturer had discontinued producing the VecTest.

Now what were we supposed to do with all of the suspect crows?  Check back here next week to find out…

Wow.

What a summer.  As you’ve probably heard or noticed, West Nile Virus (WNV) was extremely prevalent in Minnesota this summer.

WNV is what they call an “emergent disease,” meaning we recently discovered it and there’s a lot we don’t know about it.  I was taught very little about WNV in veterinary school and what I was taught has changed drastically since then.

We saw nearly 100 WNV-suspect animals this summer.  Working directly with these animals and trying to make choices in their best interest, even though there is no one resource telling me what to do, has been difficult.  It has been a journey of new discovery, many hours of researching, and dozens of emails and phone calls reaching out to professionals in all different fields trying to put this puzzle together.

It has taken me personally on a roller coaster of  extreme emotions: extremely frustrated when  a half-dozen WNV-suspect birds are admitted each day, extremely happy when I learn new information that may help me treat them, extremely sad when these WNV-suspect patients die, etc.

Finally, we’re  coming to the end of “WNV season” and I can breathe, process what I’ve learned, and try to draw conclusions that will help WNV-infected birds in the future.

I’d like to take you with me as I process everything and examine what we know now about WNV.  Hopefully this series will give you a bit of insight into a small part of what I do on a daily basis, and help you understand how we blend scientific discovery with compassion in order to help these amazing wild animals.

WNV Part 1: coming soon!

I love being a wildlife veterinarian!  However, working with over 160 species means that I need to know about many different types of animals; this makes me more of a generalist (ie. your family doctor) rather than a specialist (ie. an oncologist).  When an animal has a problem that I’m unfamiliar with and books aren’t helping, I’m not afraid to call in the true specialist for a second opinion.

This female mallard came into us after being hit by a car.  She had some wounds at the base of her beak and some scratches on one eye (a large one is visible in the photo below).

The scratches didn’t heal with typical treatment (antibiotics, pain medications), so I called an ophthalmologist.  Luckily, Dr. Olivero from the Animal Eye Clinic in St. Louis Park, is nice enough to volunteer his services for wildlife.  He examined the mallard with me and provided additional suggestions for its course of treatment. WRC is very lucky to have boarded veterinary specialists like Dr. Olivero to help our patients when needed.

Thanks to Dr. Olivero, this mallard is well on her way to recovery!