This eagle is being anesthetized so his wound over an a wing fracture can be cleaned and closed.
It's kind of hard to see, but the wing on your left hand side has a fracture near the elbow. It's a difficult surgery since it's so near the elbow. The surgery went ok, but unfortunately, he developed such a large amount of tissue reaction hear the surgery site that would not resolve--and he had to be euthanized:(
I didn't get to do any surgery, but I got to watch a lot and learned about avian orthopedics (which is one of the BIG reasons I went to the raptor center). I did do some bone pinning in carcasses which was fun.
This is a "brancher" great-horned owl. So call that because he jumps out of the nest and hops/glides from branch to branch learning to fly while still being cared for by mom. He jumped/glided/flew/fell to the ground in someone's yard, so we just ran out and put him back in the tree..what a great photo-op!AND it was BABY season so I got to examine and even help re-nest some baby raptors!!
This is a baby great-horned owl nestling--a runt for that time of the season!
Another nestling great-horned.I had an AMAZING opportunity to go out with this little guy and watch a tree-climber put him into a nest with 3 other nestlings.
Can you see the nest? it's the dark area at the top of the tree line in the middle-ish of the picture
Here is mom in the nest as we arrived. The white specks in the nest are the three owlets. Mom left as soon as the climber began to climb. The whole time he was working on the nest you could hear crows harassing the adult owl a few hundred feet away in some trees.It was pretty insane. the tree was no more than 1-1.5' in diameter and at least a 100' up! Also--the nest was too small to add another chick to--so the tree-climber (who was a tall, solid-built man!) had to climb this wimpy little, wobbly, blowing-in-the-high-winds-tree, put the existing owlets into a bag, lower them to us, hoist branches we had gathered up, build the nest up with the branches and wire, hoist the owlets + ours up and put them back in the nest.
Beginning the climb...
Can you appreciate the height? Winds were incredibly strong and a few times the top of the tree was violently swaying, i don't know, like 20 feet from side to side.Here's a video of him packing up the existing owlets and lowering them down in a bag (sorry about the side-ways---not sure how to fix it)
