A follow up to this post.
From Blue Ridge Wildlife Center
Patient update!
Our anticoagulant rodenticide great horned owl patient is not out of the woods yet, but they have moved to a pre-release enclosure - the final step before release!
Anticoagulant rodenticide toxicosis often requires a lengthy hospital stay due to the long half-life of the poison. Anticoagulant rodenticide comes in two forms: First-generation, most commonly Warfarin, and second- generation, most commonly brodifacoum and bromadiolone. The most significant difference between these two generations is the length of time that the poison stays in the body.
The first generation rodenticide, which is less commonly used, has a half-life of roughly 10-14 days. Second generation anticoagulant rodenticide has a half life reportedly weeks to months, with some studies estimating the presence of the poison persisting for over over 300 days! This is important because it dictates the length of time we must providing the antidote: Vitamin K.
We started treatment with three daily Vitamin K injections along with fluid therapy to help treat hypovolemia, or low blood volume. Once more stable, we decreased Vitamin K supplementation to once daily and treatment will continue at this level until this patient is clotting normally. The difficulty in this treatment is we don't always know how long we will need to treat - we can only go off of research and documented protocols.
After a two week course of treatment and a few days off to clear the supplemental vitamin K, we retested the blood. While this patient's anemia had largely resolved, clotting times were still VERY delayed. Blood did not clot until over an hour after sample collection. Ongoing clotting delays mean that this owl will need continued treatment. If released in this condition, a minor trauma could lead to this owl bleeding to death.
The good news is that this patient has been feeling much better! Given the owl's high stress levels in indoor hospital caging, our veterinary team decided it was time to upgrade to an outside enclosure. This owl will continue to receive vitamin K orally by injecting this patient's food with the needed supplement, minimizing the need for stressful handling.
Our previous social media post on this patient discussed the prevalence of rodenticides in our wildlife and why rodenticides are not considered a humane form of pest control. It is important to reiterate that this poison impacts more than just the intended rodents and builds up in the food chain, often killing our apex predators and scavengers. As explained, treatment time can be very long and can negatively impact the animal's well being. We remain hopeful for this owl and will continue to monitor closely.
Animals that get rehabbed need to be releasable, so getting used to humans is not in their best interest. The only handling we do with them is to treat them and is kept to a minimum.
I wouldn't say that any of the animals appreciate us, but some are calmer than others, and some will occasionally visit after release or even bring friends back looking for food or a safe spot to spend the day/night.
Some of the young released hawks will hang around as they develop their hunting skills, vultures will bring their new friends back to roost for a bit, we have a blue jay that has stayed for years that acts like it owns the place and will steal from the food we're bringing out to current residents.
But for the most part, they seem to feel like most of us would, were we to be abducted by aliens, probed, studied, and put on exhibit for a few weeks or months. We'd be wondering what was going on the whole time because we don't understand their species whatsoever, and we'd be glad when we finally got dropped back off on Earth and try to put the whole ordeal behind us, even if they never did anything aggressive to us and cured our diseases we never even knew we had.
And that's what we want! We want to be a brief, hopefully minimally traumatic interruption of their lives. Our goal is to put them right back where they were before whatever event brought them in to us. And that includes their previous distrust of humans. Over 90% of their injuries are due to us or our pets or property. So keeping them grumpy with us is one of the best things we can do for them.
It takes some mental adjustment on my part to tell myself them fighting me and biting me, and being uncooperative pains in my butt is the best thing I could experience, but I'm here for their benefit, not my own. I'm still happy to get all the time up close with them though and learning about all these amazing animals.