TISDALE — Dr. Karen Sigfrid, veterinarian with the Northeast Veterinary Services found a bald eagle in her care after a resident found it injured north of Tisdale near the lagoon.
“It was very weak and debilitated,” Sigfrid said. “I was puzzled. Usually birds come in with broken wings.”
She added the eagle looked healthy, but he couldn’t move and looked weak.
When they x-rayed him they found food in his crop – the part of the throat where birds sort their food, and blood on his beak and talons. She suspected poison.
“I didn’t know for sure what was going on. I was curious, I wanted to know what was going on and you’re always worried about the wildlife,” she said, adding that since they are at the top of the food chain, they can be affected by contaminated prey.
Another resident gave it a ride to Western College of Veterinary Medicine in Saskatoon. They have a facility there specifically for injured birds.
Soon after, Sigfrid got two more phone calls, each within a half-hour of each other, both about sick bald eagles north of town at the lagoon.
“So we went out and picked up these other two. One was found in the water, one was in the field.”
Another good Samaritan rushed the eagles to where the first one was taken for emergency care.
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The university
The first eagle, which the clinicĚý named Sky, came in on Aug. 31, just as the team was ending for the night.
“We were made aware we had a bald eagle on the way, so we all stuck around for that,” said Dr. Eryn Hanak, specialty intern in the Zoo, Exotic and Wildlife Department. “Our department includes one technologist, so a veterinary nurse; Dr. Parker, she’s our facility supervisor; myself; and Dr. Ciwko, she’s the other intern with the service.”
When the eagle arrived they went to triage him and give him a physical exam.
“When Sky came in, we already had a bit of a heads-up and a little information from Dr. Sigfrid already, but on our physical exam we were pretty dull, depressed,” Hanak said. “Usually they would be pretty reactive with us handling them. This one was not.”
She found that it seemed as if he was feeding recently on a carcass.
“When we have an animal that has its throat severely engorged, we don’t necessarily want to irritate it or worse, so we don’t feed it in case it regurgitates and aspirates,” Hanak said. “So normally we do a bit of supportive care and if they otherwise seem stable, are a bit more hands off to not cause them anymore stress at all.”
They injected Sky with some fluid under the skin and pain medication, and then put him to rest in a private room.
“All of our raptor patients in hospital, if they’re new to us and we’re not sure how stable they are or they aren’t, we are weighing them every day,” Hanak said. “We are typically giving them their fluids and pain medications multiple times a day, depending on what they need. Then they’re giving them diagnostics as they get more stable or as we find more concerns that need to be worked up.”
To get his weight taken Sky had to be wrapped up.
“For us to be able to get a weight multiple times, it means that bald eagle is pretty lethargic and not responsive.”
For the first few days it looked like it could go either way for Sky.
“We were pretty dull for a few days there, but no other outward clinical signs. Then after that crop cleared, we felt a heck of a lot better. Sky started to perk up a little bit and resented being weighed every day. Then he did show interest in eating fish for us.”
With Sky in the clear, the clinic did full body x-rays to make sure there were no additional physical problems. They found a pellet. Sky had been previously shot in the back.
Still, they didn’t know what caused Sky to be in this state. The first theory was food bloat, that he ate himself to the point of being severely sick, second on the list was toxins.
The clinic was deciding when Sky should be released back into the wild when the two other birds were brought in.
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Bodie and Jiggs
“When these two eagles showed up it was very interesting because they were found from the same area, they were obviously referred to us by the same veterinarian,” Hanak said. “They were all adults. And so you start to wonder what they all have in common.”
What they did all have in common was enlarged crops and depressed behavior.
“Then you start wondering, okay, is there something there that can be correlated with the signs that we’re seeing? Because these eagles were also lethargic, easy to handle, which shouldn’t be the normal case for an eagle at all.”
With the situation looking more critical, the clinic sent them away for additional testing.
“So we pulled more of a complete blood count from one of them,” Hanak said.
Lead came back negative. It wasn’t lead poisoning.
“Unfortunately one of them was way more ill than the others.”
The eagle they named Bodie didn’t make it, and died on Sept. 14. The other eagle, Jiggs, was still alive but was in a similar state as Sky when he came in.
“When Bodie came in, essentially it looked like we had a very full crop. She was more neurologically diseased, like she was sitting on her hawk, so sitting really funny on her ankles, and she actually had twitches to her eyes. Whereas Jiggs, Jiggs had a full crop but didn’t actually have the same neurological signs.”
The neurological signs pointed to a toxin, not neurological disease.
They gave fluid support.
“There’s little you can do for a lot of toxins. Unfortunately, there’s not an antidote to a lot of different things.”
Still wanting firm answers to what caused the illnesses, they did a post-mortem on Bodie.
The results came back positive. Toxin decreased activity of the brain. Some brain function was only at 60 per cent of what normal would be. That narrowed it down to either an organophosphate toxin or a carbamate insecticide toxin.
With the results being received, the team knew it was a sudden-onset toxin and could treat Jiggs appropriately, knowing that once the toxin was out of Jiggs’ system, the eagle would make a full recovery.
According to Hanak, the eagles were getting “feistier” by the day.
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The miracle
Sigfrid picked up the eagles from Saskatoon on the evening of Sept. 18 and released them on the morning of Sept. 19, about two weeks after their original capture.
“We wanted them to be released close to where the birds were found, but not close enough where they may find themselves poisoned again, Sigfrid said.
Returning them close to their original point was important, because they weren’t the only eagles there. There was a fourth.
“They wanted them to be on the same migratory route. We didn’t want to release them in Saskatoon. We wanted them to be released close to where they were. We thought they could have been traveling close together, because there were four at the lagoon and we thought they could have been related and they were traveling, or they could have been mates, right?”
The eagles appeared eager to get back into the wild.
Ěý“One, he just took off out of the kennel. The other one was breaking free and trying to get out of the kennel,” Sigfrid said. “That’s how good they were feeling. They were really feisty. They looked awesome. It was basically a happy ending, and that doesn’t happen often with birds.”
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