This story was originally published on my vet school blog, “Wet Cleanup on Aisle 5.”
I volunteer once a week at a wildlife sanctuary. It’s baby bird season, which means that a whole lotta baby birds need care and feeding from sunup to sundown. My job consists of feeding baby birds with a syringe.
The trouble with birds is that there is an opening into the trachea (the glottis), at the base of the tongue. If the bird happens to have its glottis open when something lands in that spot in its mouth, that something drops straight into their lungs. Obviously, one doesn’t want to squirt a syringe full of food right onto their glottis, or they will aspirate it and keel over. One has to shove the syringe further back into the throat so as to avoid the glottis.
Finches, being the little bitty birds that they are, are even littler and bittier when they are babies. And a syringe tip is just about as big as their mouth is. This makes it a little tough to get the syringe past the glottis, so you just try the best you can. Unfortunately, it doesn’t always work.
Such was the case last week when I pulled up the cover of the finch cage to feed them for the third time during my shift, and after a few minutes I noticed a small brown lump tucked under the foliage at the back of the cage. ACK! A mostly dead finch was lying there, looking miserable. Diagnosis: aspiration. Prognosis: death.
Killing a baby finch is not really my idea of a pleasant evening. Despite the reassurances from other staff members that this kind of thing happens, I still went home feeling like a complete failure.
This past weekend I returned to my post with trepidation, and with a bird-icide phobia. I kept double-checking every few minutes to make sure that I hadn’t offed anyone, even the magpies, with their ginormous mouths and easy-to-avoid glottises.
The good news is that I talked more with other staff members, and found out that almost everyone there has accidentally murdered a bird at one point or other. I guess that’s not good news. But it does make one feel better.
Apparently my finch death was the first in a rash of finch deaths, such that they changed their finch-feeding protocol slightly. We’re now feeding them with tinier syringe tips, and it’s a whole lot easier. Phew.
