Officers rescue sick birds

Animal control officers in Laguna Beach are picking up many sick pelicans up and down the coast.

Laguna Beach officers like Joy Falk have been taking in about one debilitated California brown pelican every other day. They have found other sick birds as well, Falk said.

“We found a cormorant just yesterday and a loon today,” Falk said.

Falk said the pelicans are often underweight. She determines how malnourished a pelican is by feeling its keel, which is a bone down the middle of its chest.

“There’s usually a lot of muscle around the bone, so if we can feel the bone, then it’s really skinny,” Falk said. “That also means that the pelican is eating its fat reserves around its bone, which means that it isn’t finding enough food in the ocean.”

Since January, more than 100 dehydrated and sick California brown pelicans have been sent to rehabilitation centers such as the Wetlands and Wildlife Care Center in Huntington Beach.

“They’re finding them on the beach, on the streets, on the piers, just in places where they’re not normally,” said Terri Oba, a wildlife technician at the care center. “And any time you can walk up to a wild animal and pick it up, there’s something wrong with it. Keep in mind, these guys are coming in starving, debilitated. They’re so debilitated, they’re just so weak that they don’t have the strength to do anything else.”

Department of Fish and Game officers are testing the birds’ feathers to discover what is weakening so many of the pelicans. At the moment, wildlife technicians working at the center are uncertain why so many pelicans are showing up on the coast.

“There are a lot of different theories about the availability of food source, the weather, things like that,” Oba said. “But we really don’t know. There’s probably a lot of different reasons that this has happened, a lot of different sources, probably food or weather related, a lot of different things. But there isn’t just one thing that’s causing it. We don’t exactly know.”

The pelicans sent to the Wetlands and Wildlife Care Center come in dehydrated with low body temperature. The workers feed the birds smelt and treating them with heat therapy and hydration.

“Sometimes they have to be in a heated hospital room or an intensive care type unit,” Oba said. “A lot of that is just getting them hydration and liquid therapy, like water. Basically, we need to get them hydrated. We need to get their nutrition levels up, so we need to feed them. Say if you were really weak and starving, those are the kinds of things we would do for a person in a similar way.”

The technicians and workers assess the birds, making sure they are bright, alert and responsive before they release them. The birds must be waterproofed first, said Kelly Beaver, a technician at the Wetlands and Wildlife Center.

“They’re sea birds, so they spend a lot of time in the water. And if they’re not waterproofed, they get hypothermic,” Beaver said. “And if they’re not waterproofed they sink. You can tell when their feathers are wet just by the condition of their feathers. If they’re not waterproofed, we go through a whole conditioning process of washing them in large tubs with Dawn [soap].”

The volunteers and workers then attach small bands onto the birds, so that they can identify them if they ever show up on the shore again.

They have to make sure the birds have gained weight and are healthy enough to fly from the coast, Beaver said.