“I was eating lunch and heard a horrible thud,” says Barbara Colquhoun, describing the moments before she discovered that a bird had flown into the glass window leading to her back deck in Sealeigh Park last Tuesday (August 26).
“It was a beautiful bird, and lying there with his eyes open, he looked too bright not to save.”
Colquhoon immediately called the office of Dr. Alastair Westcott, Bowen Island’s vet, to ask what to do.
“He told me that if the bird still wasn’t moving at
4 p.m., to bring it in.”
For the next three hours, Colquhoon sat with the bird and fed it water through an eyedropper to prevent dehydration. When the bird still wasn’t moving at 4 p.m., she enlisted her neighbour to drive her to the vet’s office with the bird.
Westcott determined that it was a young Cooper’s Hawk, a predatory bird known for exceptional flying abilities. The vet administered an anti-inflammatory and ensured that no bones were broken. Throughout the night, he injected a solution into its wings in order to help keep its electrolytes in balance.
The next morning Westcott called the O.W.L Rehabilitation Society in Boundary Bay and informed them about what had happened. The organization is dedicated to the rescue and rehabilitation of injured birds of prey, and they informed Westcott that volunteer helicopter pilot Norm Snihur would fly to Bowen to pick up the bird.
At about 3 p.m. on Wednesday, Westcott handed the bird to Sinhur in a cardboard box right next to a set of tennis courts in Fairweather where the pilot managed to land his helicopter. After dropping off the cooper’s hawk, he said, he’d head to Salt Spring to save a seal.
Martina Versteeg, one of the bird care staff at O.W.L. says the young hawk is recovering slowly.
“He’s not fully standing yet, it can take a while after this kind of trauma for the nerves to recover,” she says, adding that the centre is currently housing more than five cooper’s hawks in varying stages of recovery.
“This kind of injury is quite common in birds that eat other birds,” says Versteeg. “We like to encourage people to keep their feeders away from windows, because this often happens if a hawk or other predator is swooping in to eat another bird at the feeder.”
It will likely take the young hawk rescued by Barbara Colquhoun several weeks to recover fully, says Versteeg.
“We’ll test him in a flight cage to make sure that he is capable of hunting,” she says. “Once he proves that he is able to pass the test, we’ll send him back to Bowen.”
