Great Horned Owl Release at Tri-State Bird Rescue

So there is certainly more coming about my two weeks at Tri-State Bird Rescue and Research, but during the first of my two weeks there, I got a chance to help out and take photos of the release of one of our birds, a Great Horned Owl.  This guy had been with us for a few months; he had been found sick and unable to fly in the early spring.  He's had a very slow recovery; for a while they were unsure if he was going to make it.  He started out indoors in a small cage where he could be monitored closely twice a day and was then moved outside into a larger cage.  The last step before release is to be moved into one of the flight cages, a much bigger cage with room for the large birds to actually fly and to make sure that he can catch live prey.  Finally, it was finally deemed time to be released! 

After contacting the people that found him (most adult birds are returned to their home environment so that everything is familiar when they are released) and arranging a time to bring him out, the next steps were to catch him out of his flight cage (easier said than done), band him (for identification purposes in case he is ever caught again), and drive him out to his home to let him loose!

First, here's a few pictures of this handsome fellow in his flight cage!














We started with a box, a towel, some raptor gloves, and two nets.  Once the birds are healthy, it's a lot harder to catch them than it was when they first arrive, sick and unable to fly, especially since this guy was smart enough to hang from the ceiling out of reach of our nets.


















Finally we got a hold of him and gently was able to move him out of the net and into a towel and then a box, careful to avoid his sharp talons and beak!


























 Next we brought him inside to band him.  Banding is a federally regulated process, so that birds can be identified no matter where they are found in the USA.  The bird's leg is carefully measured to find the right sized band, and then put on carefully and filed down to get rid of any sharp points.

Then he was ready to go!  His home was about a half hour away, so he was loaded back into his box and driven to the farm where he had been found a few months before.  Despite the fact that he hadn't been there for months and had not been free to fly any great distance for that whole time, he didn't miss a beat.  The box was gently tipped over, opened, and out he came!  His feet didn't even touch the ground- he just took off into the trees on the other side of the property!

It was really beautiful to see; he was a gorgeous bird that needed months of care and rehab to be released, but watching him fly away certainly makes all of that worthwhile! 


Next up, a more complete description of my rotation at Tri-State!

The next few rotations...

So after my trip to Nebraska, I came back to UPenn for my next few rotations... It's been a whirwind few months, so consider this the highlight reel!

First off was Emergency and Critical Care at New Bolton Center, so as you can imagine, we saw all the emergencies that came into the hospital as well any of the colics or diarrhea cases.  It was a busy two weeks with lots of overnight on-call shifts!  We saw our fair share of equine colics, some of the surgical and some of them able to be medically managed.  We also had a foal come in with septic joints that we treated; here is a picture of a septic joint treatment. 

  

The joint was flushed each day with sterile fluids and infused with antibiotics.  These were intensive but rewarding treatments for us, as our little foal kept improving over the week and got to go home!  We also had a few goats, ponies, and miniature horses join us for a visit.

Next rotation was Small Animal Radiology.  It was a great rotation for learning, as we spent hours every day looking at radiographs and trying to analyze them.  In the afternoons, we learned to take good radiographs and had few labs (like an ultrasound lab) to get more comfortable using all the equipment.  It was a great rotation!  Here's a photo of our fake dog that we got to practice our technique on. 

  

I have to say, he was a little easier to work with than many of our patients!  And here's Casey manning the controls! 

Definitely one of the highlights of the rotation was getting to "drive" the ultrasound machine.  We brought a few of our personal critters in as volunteers and each of us got a chance to scan their abdomens.

  

 In radiology, we also do all the CT scans and the MRIs for the hospital, so we gained a little bit of experience with these as well.

 

Next up was Small Animal Surgery.  After having a pretty kind schedule on Radiology (8 am to 6 pm with some weekend duties), Surgery took a little bit of getting used to!  Morning treatments needed to be done by 7 am or 8 am (depending on the day) and after a long day in surgery or in appointments, we were then responsible for all of our evening treatments; 12 hour days were the norm, but my longest was a shift from 6 am until midnight, which was a little rough, especially the next morning!  Despite the long hours, I was on with a great group of students and clinicians, and we learned and saw a lot!  Some of the surgeries in the hospital are being done laparoscopically, so we got a chance to see quite a few of these.  Here's a picture of one of these surgeries being done!  

 

We also had quite a few other surgeries including a few orthopedic ones, some spays and neuters, wound repairs, and some thoracic surgeries.  Overall, it was an exhausting and intense but great rotation!

There's no rest for the weary though!  Moving on to Dermatology and a chance to catch up on some much needed sleep while learning a LOT about skin diseases in dogs and cats!  I don't have any pictures from Derm, but we treated our share of allergies, ringworm, ear disease, etc over the course of the two weeks.  Highlights definitely included a middle ear flush, skin biopsies, and allergy testing, as well as getting a chance to hang out with all the awesome Derm people!

Next up: Small Animal Emergency Service!  Emergency is always a surprise... Just when you think you've seen it all, something ridiculous walks through the door! Days are usually slow and boring or insanely busy, so you try to be prepared but have to be read to roll with the punches!  I loved this rotation, and am very excited that I'm taking it again in over the Christmas holiday and in the spring. 

After ES, I headed to New Bolton Center (back in Kennett Square) for two rotations. First up was Medicine followed by Large Animal (read: mostly horses) Reproduction.  They were both great rotations.  Medicine was super busy the first week, and most days looked like this:
? to 8 am: Do treatments and write SOAPS for all patients (I had three) (? means anytime between 5 and 6, depending on the morning)
8 am to 9 am: NBC rounds (different topics each day ranging from radiology to pathology)
9 am to 10 am: Medicine rounds (went over each of our cases)
10 am to 11 am: Take care of my clostridial myositis cow (the best cow in the world) who needed flushes of her leg followed by walks/grazing outside
11 am to 4 pm: Doing all treatments for our patients, usually involving eye meds every two hours plus comfort checks for everyone PLUS taking any new appointments, of which there were a few every day WHILE still trying to attend other appointments so we could actually learn something
4 pm to 5 pm: Teaching rounds ranging from neurology, swine medicine, antibiotics, etc
5 pm until finished: Treatments of all patients again, including lovely cow, which usually got finishing between 7 pm or 8 pm at night
8 pm to 9 pm: eat something, shower, and go to bed



THEN, there were on call shifts and treatment shifts on top of that; getting called in to do treatments from 1030 pm to 1 am after a full day was definitely at the bottom of my list of "fun things at NBC".


Despite the crazy schedule, Medicine was great. We had so many interesting cases including a few neurologic horses, blind horses, my favorite cow of all time, a pig with a broken leg, a sheep with a PCV of 7, etc, etc, etc. 


With very little chance to rest (I did treatments the last Sunday night of the two weeks from 6 pm to midnight), I jumped right into Reproduction, another simply awesome rotation.  All the awesome folks in the repro service take teaching very seriously, so they have labs scheduled for us every day and even have a herd of mares that we work with on a daily basis to improve our repro skills including rectal palpation, ultrasound, artificial insemination, uterine flushes, etc, all the while monitoring these horse for changes in their estrus cycle.  The rest of our days were filled with procedures on client mares; we got a chance to be a part of embryo transfer, artificial insemination, semen collection, and more!  Here's a photo of our beautiful teaching mares in the pasture; these ladies have a very lucky life!

And here's an (albeit) terrible photo of me right before I inseminated my first mare!

 

And a much better shot of Candice and Ashley doing the same!

 

And here is a little embryo that "we" made; one of the students inseminated the mare, then together we flushed it out of the mare 8 days later!

After this rotation, I headed to Tri-State Bird Rescue- stay tuned for an upcoming blog entry!

Beef Cattle Calving in Clay Center, Nebraska

Well, not really IN Clay Center, more like 4 miles West of Clay Center which, if you haven't heard from it, is pretty much in the middle of nowhere, at least to an East Coast girl like me!  Although I really wasn't sure how I was going to feel about being in Nebraska for a week, as it turned out, I absolutely loved it.  As I mentioned in my last post, this externship was run at the federal USMARC facility- a meat research facility with somewhere in the range of 6,500 beef cows.  Since we don't have many beef cows in PA, I'll bore you with a little background on how this works.  Beef cows live on pasture pretty much their whole lives.  They are bred (sometimes by bulls, sometimes by artificial insemination) in the spring and then have their calves a little less than a year later. These girls are hardy; most of them have their calves outside on their own!  The calves usually get up not long after, start nursing, and then follow their mothers around for the next few months.  In the fall, the calves are weaned and taken to a feedlot, where they are fed concentrated grain to gain muscle mass until they are slaughtered a few months later.  If given a choice of being one of our domestic food animals, I'd choose to be a beef cow every time!  These gals are HAPPY!  They really spend their lives grazing and taking care of their babies, and they don't have to deal with us very often at all!

 

   During spring calving season, however, they have to be watched a little more closely.  At the USMARC facility, the cows that are ready to calve are brought into a pasture close to one of the pole sheds.  Multiple times a day (and even overnight), cowboys ride through the pasture (on horseback or on Gators) to check on the cows.  For the most part, calving moms are left alone; we only intervene when they are having problems (or if they've been trying to give birth for too long).  When that happens, the cows are herded into the pole shed (by cowboys on horseback) and put into a chute.  Keep in mind that these girls are not pets, so they don't have any interest in being manipulated by people.  Although most of the time the cowboys can pull the calves themselves, they are really good about deferring to us so that we can get some experience as well!  Calves that can't be pulled are operated on right there in the barn, and you'd be surprised how well the cows usually do with this!  You'll see them a day or two later, baby by their side, back out in the field like nothing happened.  The week we were there most of the cows did just what they were supposed to do; they had their babies out in the field on their own.  We did pull 4 calves, and all of them were alive and continued to do well!  Here are a few pictures of us pulling one of the calves.  It's truly a team effort!  One person reaches into the vagina to make sure the head and feet are where they are supposed to be and to help stretch things out, while the rest of us slowly started pulling.  With a little patience and effort, we were able to get this one out without too much trouble!

After the calf gets pulled out, the first priority is to make sure he/she is alive and to help him start breathing.  Since many of these guys have been pushed on for a little too long, they tend to be a little slower than the ones that are born without assistance.  We stimulate them by rubbing their sides, tickling their nose, and clearing out their mouth and nose.  Because it's vital for calves to drink the first milk from their mother (it's full of antibodies that protect them from diseases), whenever calves are born with assistance, we take the time to milk out the colostrum (the first milk) and bottle feed it to the calf, just to make sure that the calf gets what he needs. 

Because most of these cows were doing their job, we didn't have a whole lot of OB work to do.  But that didn't mean we weren't busy!  Every morning, we were picked up by one of cowboys on their way to the pole shed a little before 6 am.  We did the first check of the morning with them in the Gator, driving through the pasture and shining a light on each of the cows to make sure they were doing ok.  After it got light, the fun began!  Every morning, the calves born the previous day or overnight needed to be processed!  They all got ear tags, weighed, and banded (to castrate the little boys).  You can imagine that we weren't always very popular with the moms; some of them were very protective of their babies, so oftentimes one of us had to keep an eye on the mom to make sure she wasn't going to try to come take her baby away! On a few occasions, we had to "steal" the calf for a few minutes by driving off with it in the Gator just to keep from being charged.  In the past, these gals have been known to knock over a Gator or to rip a door off to get to their calf, so we're always extra cautious.

Once the calves have been processed, they (along with their moms) get moved into a fresh pasture. This keeps everyone healthier as brand new calves are kept separated from the older ones, and keeps the pasture a little less chaotic!  This is either done on horseback or by putting the calf into a sled (pulled by the Gator) and luring mom to follow into the next field.  It's always an adventure as sometimes the moms decide they don't care enough to follow or the calf decides he's happy where he is!

Moving the moms and babies by horseback

After all the morning work, we drove around with the veterinarian, Dr. Ondrak, to check in with all of the pole sheds on the facility, making sure that no one had any medical issues.  We ended up splinting a few calves with contracted tendons, amongst other things.  In the afternoons we did necropsies of anything that had died the previous day, including cattle, pigs, and sheep and made a few visits to the pole sheds and feedlot.  On our visit to the feedlot, we did an exploratory surgery to look for any leftover testicular tissue.  In the evenings, we went back out to the pole sheds to do evening checks of all the cows.

Putting splints on a calf with contracted tendons

The little calf a few days later, right before we took off the splints! 

One of the little orphan calves...  Sometimes they have twins and can't always take care of the second one.  We fed these guys twice a day until there is a cow available to take them on.

This cow lost her calf, so we got her to accept this little orphan as her own.

Luke beginning our exploratory surgery on the feedlot steer

The whole week was just great!  I had such a good time getting to work with everyone; they were very patient and fantastic about teaching us!  It was also amazing to really get to see a large-scale beef operation like this, since we have so few beef cattle in the Eastern US.