Veterinarian Performs Surgery on Injured Bald Eagle Accidentally Shot by Hunters
This veterinary surgeon performed a complicated surgery on an injured bald eagle who was accidentally shot by hunters. She broke the bone in her wing and was rescued and brought for treatment. The doctor fixed the break and the bird made a full recovery. She was able to fly again after a few weeks.
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NewsTranscript
00:00 Bringing in this gorgeous bald eagle that unfortunately broke its humerus, its
00:05 upper arm bone. What an amazingly beautiful creature.
00:10 And so basically the plan is we're going to take a look at the x-rays and figure
00:15 out the surgical strategy, where I'm going to put my pins, how I'm going to be
00:19 able to stabilize this broken bone and then obviously get
00:24 back to Kathy at Shades of Hope and give her the good news that hopefully
00:28 everything goes well. So this guy was the unfortunate victim of a
00:33 hunting accident. The hunters were shooting at ducks and this guy swooped
00:38 in at the wrong time and was shot through the wing. He has a broken humerus
00:43 which is the main bone on the wing, running from the shoulder to the elbow.
00:49 So hopefully today we will be able to put some pins in there and fix him up
00:55 and after a few weeks of recovery get him on his way.
00:59 So likely this bird got clipped and then kind of dive-bombed and hit a tree or hit the ground or whatnot.
01:05 But thank goodness the hunters didn't just leave it and laugh and have a beer.
01:09 They actually went and got the bird and then contacted Shades of Hope, who then called me.
01:14 So this poor little bald eagle had a very clean but very dangerous and very severe fracture to the humerus,
01:21 the upper arm bone. Right in the center, single fracture. So at least it was kind of ideal for surgery.
01:28 The big question is, is not repairing the bone that's likely going to be successful.
01:36 It's how much damage has been done to the muscles to allow this bird to fly in the future.
01:41 Right? That's going to be part of the problem.
01:44 I mean you can see in this black spot right there, that's air inside.
01:51 Like that's separation of the muscle.
01:53 I mean, I'm not a hunter, I don't know much about bullets.
01:57 But I have seen, we've seen a lot of birds that have been shot and they've got,
02:02 I mean the bullets don't even make it through their shoulder muscle half the time.
02:06 It gets stopped, right?
02:08 Because these aren't like handguns. They're using, we either see BB pellets or shotgun pellets.
02:14 And as you said, they don't have a huge velocity.
02:17 So I would be stunned to have to expect a bone or a bullet to cause this.
02:25 Now the bullet may have hit him somewhere else and he then fell and crashed and broke his humerus.
02:34 That's definitely possible because that's quite a break for it to be due to a bullet.
02:41 And for the bullet to pass on through. So that's pretty unusual.
02:47 So the plan today is we're going to take a pin, we're going to go in through the fracture site.
02:54 We're going to put a pin up, up the center of the bone, and the bones are hollow in birds.
03:00 All the way up through the shoulder, bring this bone back and then advance that same pin down through.
03:08 And then we're going to have two or three pins, maybe four pins on the other side going externally
03:19 that we can then attach with this putty and sort of have a basically a wire cage holding this whole thing together.
03:27 Wow, surgery, it is tough doing surgery on these guys.
03:31 It was kind of a perfect fracture. It is a perfect fracture for us to fix in the sense of it's away from the joints
03:38 and it's a single clean fracture.
03:40 But the big problem I'm having with this bird is the muscles have contracted and they're so strong,
03:46 these big birds of prey, that the bone is actually, instead of being lined up together and just having a little break,
03:53 it's been pulled, these muscles have pulled it all the way across.
03:56 So we've had to pull, pull, pull and try and overcome those strong flight muscles
04:01 to be able to straighten it out and line up those end pieces.
04:05 Surgery itself, as far as the technique and the cutting and the sewing went very, very well.
04:12 The problem we're having is the tube is falling out.
04:15 You can only slide that anesthetic tube in just a little bit in birds.
04:19 Very different from cats and dogs where you can put it way far down the trachea.
04:23 And the big issue is this thing keeps wanting to wake up.
04:28 And it actually did wake up very briefly when we were plucking the feathers.
04:32 [Music]
04:59 We take a pin, a long sort of what's called an IM pin or intermedullary in the bone pin.
05:05 And we go up the fracture through the shoulder so that we can pull it up farther
05:11 and then down into the other end of the bone, the other fracture line.
05:16 And this allows us to take that pin out later on.
05:21 Unlike, say, mammals, people, dogs, cats, we can't put in plates or heavy wiring into these birds
05:28 because we can't remove them and the birds won't be able to fly.
05:31 This giant bird only weighed 10 pounds.
05:34 So, you know, 500 grams, let's say, of metal is going to make a big difference.
05:39 So the plan now is the bird goes back to Shades of Hope and gets some lovely TLC there.
05:45 And in about three weeks, I'll assess the wing, pull those pins rather easily just with a mild sedative.
05:52 And then we'll give them another couple of weeks for her to get stronger and start testing flight.
05:57 They have a nice big sort of flight testing building there.
06:01 And hopefully before Christmas in six or seven weeks, this bird will be off flying around and enjoying life.
06:08 And hopefully she's going to stay away from ducks when she thinks there might be hunters around.
06:13 Hopefully she learned her lesson.
06:15 [Music]
06:30 This is the bald eagle that we saw at Wellington a couple of days ago, the broken humerus.
06:36 He's healing up great.
06:38 We're calling him Wolf because he's a pain in the ass and he likes to try and eat everybody.
06:43 Apparently that's a good sign.
06:46 We just did some physiotherapy on him, stretched out and massaged his patagian,
06:52 the ligament that kind of runs from the shoulder down towards the carpus, basically.
06:59 And putting on a new body wrap.
07:02 How often do you do this?
07:03 Every year.
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