This week: Bird flu
It is wet season again in sub-tropical Hong Kong, and I just love sitting on the roof, and looking at rainstorms and lightning over the sea. It is awe-inspiring and majestic. One of my favourite holiday memories was during a backpacking trip to Darwin, in the Northern Territory of Australia. It was the early 1980s and my travelling mate and I were on foot walking to a pier that is literally almost the northernmost pier of Australia.
We were young, it was the start of a long holiday, we had just got off the plane and had more than a little to drink. These were the excuses I made for myself for singing Like a Virgin and La Bamba while strolling in an ever-intensifying tropical rainstorm. Darwin is situated next to the Timor Sea and has a tropical climate akin to Bangkok. We were sharing an umbrella that was becoming more and more inadequate as the raindrops coalesced to bucket size. Soon, we were soaked through to our underwear and we dispensed with the umbrella and just enjoyed being wet. We managed to hobble our way to the end of the pier and sat down drenched, and watched the most spectacular lightning display about 30km out to sea. It was a continual lightning storm with literally thousands of strikes per minute. The night sky was aglow and there was a strong smell of ozone.
Being typhoon season again and with the severe rainstorms that have been occurring of late, there has been a spate of people bringing in small juvenile birds that have fallen out of nests after the storms. Unfortunately for these small wild birds, especially the common types such as the tailorbird, Japanese white-eye, magpie, bulbuls, spotted dove, robins and numerous others, their survival rate is rather poor and they are never able to fend for themselves again without their mother's upbringing. Even in the old days, before the fear of bird flu, it would have been inappropriate to try fostering these common birds for release as they would inevitably die prematurely in the wild. So my job back before the age of bird flu was to euthanise these common avian species.
Occasionally, someone would bring in a heron, owl, kite or some rare species, and we would try to give them first aid and send these off to Kadoorie Farm for possible rehabilitation. This presented us with some unusual dangers. As vets we are trained to handle most commonly kept animals, but most vets have little training when it comes to wild animals.
I remember walking in on a very odd scene once: I heard some rather painful screaming from the treatment room next door and ran to find out what was happening. I opened the door to find a vet and a nurse holding on to a black kite, or rather the black kite was holding on to the vet and the nurse. Apparently they had used a towel to cover the head of the kite to avoid being bitten while trying to get the bird out of the cage. Apparently the bird was deceptively docile and didn't struggle as it was being removed from the cage. Suddenly it came alive and used its claws to grab the hands of the vet and nurse when being lifted.