next message in archive
next message in thread
previous message in archive
Index of Subjects
This is a multi-part message in MIME format.
------=_NextPart_000_0040_01CB5274.C7E811F0
Content-Type: text/plain;
charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
The Adventures of a Brown Pelican CBC Radio One Information Morning Nova
Scotia
September 10, 2010 8:39 AM
[Elizabeth Logan (EL)] "What a wonderful bird is the pelican. Its beak can
hold more than its belly can, but, when it comes to global positioning, the
poor pelican can be sadly lacking navigational skills. As you may have
heard, one of the Southern birds that was swept up the Coast with Hurricane
Earl, had a mishap yesterday. The brown pelican flew into the road the
stopped traffic in front of Ralph's Place Tavern [135 Main Street] in
Dartmouth. It's now convalescing in the Hope for Wildlife Shelter. Hope
Swinamer runs the Shelter and she caught the errant bird."
[Don Connelley (DC)] "Good morning, Hope. How's your pal?"
[Hope, laughing (HS)] "He's great."
[DC] "Is it a he?"
[HS] "It's hard to tell."
[DC] "Yeah, we were just wondering, it went to Ralph's, we were just
wondered."
[HS, laughing] "It's probably a boy."
[DC] "That was our supposition before the news at 8:00 a.m. How did it come
to your attention yesterday, by the way?"
[HS] "It was a really fun day. I received a phone call around 3 o'clock, I
think it was. At first I thought maybe it was case of mistaken identity, but
once I asked the lady on the phone a few more questions, I found out it was
just, like, two buildings down from where I work, so I said, oh, I'll go and
check it out, so I grabbed a blanket and I headed in behind Coast Tire [67
Tacoma Drive] and there were two gentlemen there watching and they said,
'Yes, it's definitely a pelican,' and they thought it was injured and they
said it was up on the roof of Ralph's,
... and I couldn't see it at that point because it was just tucked in behind
the air conditioning unit, so I went in and asked permission to go up on the
roof and I don't think they believe me (laughs), so they kind of looked at
me like, 'No, you're not going up on the roof,' but at that exact moment in
time, the pelican decided to fly off the roof and to go over to the
MacDonald's parking lot [across from Ralph's] , and he looked really good,
so, you know, I thought, well, maybe there's no need to get involved here, I
mean, it is, you know, the time of year where there's lots of food and the
pelican could probably do just fine and figure out his own way home, so I
wandered over and looked at him a little closer and he flew again to the
rooftop of Dartmouth Vet Hospital [61 Tacoma Drive] and I went up there and
by the time I got up there, he was gone and I couldn't see him at all so I
decided to go back to work, and probably about 10 minutes later, people
started piling into Dartmouth Vet and they're saying, "The pelican is over
at the Burger King [75 Tacoma Drive] eating French fries and hamburgers,'
... so I decided I better go over and take another look, and when I did,
when I arrived he was really causing some traffic issues and, you know, he
almost got hit two or three times, and at that point, I was thinking, maybe
I should get involved here and I still had my blankets and he decided to fly
at that point and sort of crashed into the windows of the Dollarama and so
he was sort of grounded and that's when I was able to run over and grab him
and get the blanket over him and get him to the Dartmouth Vet Hospital."
[DC] "Going from Ralph's to MacDonald's to Burger King and then knocking
himself out, sounds like a Saturday night, doesn't it (laughing)? Sounds
like a bad Saturday night. So, but it didn't, let's call him a he for fun,
he didn't hurt himself."
[HS] "No, but Dr. Barry MacEachern examined him, around, it was probably
around 6 o'clock by the time we got a chance to give him a really good
check-over. He did complete x-rays and, of course, every species, it's
different, and it's not like a human doctor where you just need to learn the
anatomy of one species. Every time something new like this comes in, you
know, it's digging out the books, ah, we noticed some subcut. air sacs which
were kind of filled and they felt a little crinkly to the touch which was
kind of odd, but Dr. MacEachern found that this is quite normal in pelicans
and he's not overly concerned. The xrays showed no breaks so everything from
that point of view went really well. He wasn't that dehydrated - we were
really worried that he might be really weak and so we didn't have to hook
him up to IV fluids or anything like that."
[DC] "Did he feel lighter than usual - maybe, like, underfed?"
[HS] "Yes, he's, they're very, you know I've had the pleasure of working
with two others, and they're very light birds, like it's deceiving because
they are tall and they have this big, huge beak and they have a huge wing
span, but, when you go to pick one up, there's not much there, probably
about 3 or 4 kilograms is all he was."
[DC] "Any plan to see if you can get him a little closer to home?"
[HS] "Yes, well last night went really well. I had to search about four
different stores before I could find fresh mackeral with the heads and all,
and I was able to find a few of them, and, I think, you know, the next few
days we'll just sort of see how he does, he had a full fish last night and
he took another one this morning, and I'd kind of just like, I mean the
easiest thing to do would be to just fly him down to a wildlife rehab in the
States that specializes in pelicans and they could release him from there. I
think it would give him the best possible chance, I mean, the other option
would be to let him go from here and he would probably figure things out and
head on down, but, ah, I think I'd just put him on a plane and, you know, he's
there quickly and it would probably be the best thing for him."
[DC] "We'll check with you and maybe see how that goes next week."
[HS] "You bet!"
[DC] "And, we have 30 second left, many reports across the Province of other
birds requiring a little help?"
[HS] "Yes, we've had hundreds of calls every day and probably close to 80 or
90 birds dropped off. We've had Royal Terns, two of them arrive, we've had
Cardinals, we've had Yellowlegs, lots of sea birds, we had a Shearwater the
other day, too, but, most of these birds are in really hard shape."
[DC] "Are they? And you still have some of them there?"
[HS] "Yes."
[DC] "Thank you very much, Hope."
[HS] "Thank you."
[DC] "Good to talk to you, good bye."
[EL] "Hope Swinamer runs The Hope for Wildlife Shelter."
------=_NextPart_000_0040_01CB5274.C7E811F0
Content-Type: text/html;
charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<HTML><HEAD>
<META content=3D"text/html; charset=3Diso-8859-1" =
http-equiv=3DContent-Type>
<STYLE>.hmmessage P {
PADDING-BOTTOM: 0px; MARGIN: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 0px; PADDING-RIGHT: =
0px; PADDING-TOP: 0px
}
BODY.hmmessage {
FONT-FAMILY: Tahoma; FONT-SIZE: