So, I’m driving home on Friday (the 16th) after mowing a friend’s lawn.  My cell phone rings and I tap my earpiece to take the call.  It was Denise, sounding worried.  She was at her current favorite pond near Penitencia Creek doing nature photography and had noticed a young pied-billed grebe (Podilymbus podiceps) that had become partially entangled in some plastic mesh.  She’d been working for about an hour to try to capture it and take it to the nearby wildlife rescue center, but the bird could still swim well enough to elude capture.  Could I come by, she asked, and lend a hand?

I swung by and Denise pointed out the bird in question.  It had strands of plastic across the corners of it’s beak, preventing it from closing all the way.  It also couldn’t eat, drink, or groom itself. Mesh also had gotten wrapped around the body so that its wings were pinioned, and one leg was somewhat restricted in its range of motion.  But, it could still swim faster than Denise and I could wade or even swim (and we tried both, repeatedly) fast enough to get close enough to capture it.  We didn’t have a net or anything like that, just a damp towel.

Figure 1: A young pied-billed grebe with a serious problem. Photo by Denise Greaves.

Now this was not just any youngling.  Denise had photographed this bird before when it was just a fuzzy hatchling, and had documented its growth over the last few weeks.  That made it personal, and we were determined that it should not succumb to something as infernally stupid and pointless as dying a slow, painful death because of a scrap of litter.  You can see some of this from the photo in Figure 1.  Frankly, that picture is hard for me to look at.

But as I watched the bird, examining it from a distance as best I could I was able to see that it was frustrated, tired, and scared.  Its feathers were bedraggled and wet. So we waded out into the pond, at times up to the armpits, trying to coax it back to shore where one of us might be able to grab it.  One problem was a fence that goes all the way around the pond, right at the water’s edge.  It’s a needed safety precaution, but in this case it kept us from getting close enough quickly enough to catch it.

Another problem came from its fellow grebes.  It seems that when a young one shows signs of distress, the others of its species go all Darwinian and turn on it.  We saw other grebes chasing it, and at times even trying to drag it underwater.  So this bird was having a very, very bad day.

So, we waited, and waded, and wallowed, and followed, and schemed, and swam, and watched our young friend for the next three hours, looking for an opportunity.  Finally around 6:00 PM we got a break.  The grebe was swimming very close to shore near where I was crouched down, watching.  One of the other grebes got very aggressive and chased it out of the pond and, it an effort to escape, our grebe squeezed under the fence–the very fence that had caused so much trouble for us.  It hobbled a few inches further away from the fence, and I knew this was going to be my best shot at catching it.

Luckily, I still had the wet towel.  Wadding it lightly, I pitched it from about eight feet away.  Every toss of wadded paper towards a wastebasket across the room, every pick-up game of “horse” in the driveway was, I feel, focused on that moment.  The towel landed in precisely the right spot: partially covering the bird, and also partly blocking the exit hole back through the fence.

I pounced, and managed to get both hands and most of the towel around the grebe.  At this point, Denise gave a cry of triumph mingled with relief, and ran over to help.  While I kept the patient from squirming too much, Denise fumbled through the blades on my Swiss Army knife until she got the scissors unfolded, and then proceeded to  clip anywhere she saw plastic strands.  Gradually the bird started to unfold itself from its bonds, which made it a little harder to hold onto until Denise draped a flap of towel over its head.

We made our way towards the Wildlife Center, hoping against hope that we could get some help there.  To our immense relief, someone was there even though it was after hours, and they took our bird in for treatment.

We spend an anxious weekend wondering how things were going, but a call on Monday confirmed that the bird had not only survived, it had responded to treatment so well that it had been released.  Naturally, Denise went straight up to the pond to get a picture.

Figure 2: Our young grebe on Monday the 18th after being released: happy, healthy, and back home. Photo by Denise Greaves.

As you can see, it’s doing well and is back to enjoying being a young pied-billed grebe.

A couple of thoughts have come out of this.  First of all, we want to thank the Wildlife Center of Silicon Valley.  This wonderful organization rehabilitates and releases injured wildlife, and does excellent educational work.  They deserve your generous support, and I urge you to visit their web site (http://www.wcsv.org/) and make a donation.  We have taken other wildlife in distress there, and they do a fantastic job of healing and returning our injured wild neighbors to their homes.

Another thought was the level of focus both of us felt about this project.  There seemed to be a unspoken understanding that we were going to rescue that bird no matter what.  So when we finally succeeded, the sense of relief was almost overpowering.

I also found myself filled with feelings of utter disgust, both at myself and my fellow humans for using the kind of plastic products that can so easily entrap an animal, condemning it to slow, agonizing death.   If you don’t already, make sure that any plastic materials that could do this are rendered incapable of doing so before you throw them out.

The human propensity for caring about the welfare of animals made much of our civilization possible.  It was a necessary trait for domesticating animals.  It is still necessary, perhaps more than ever.  Caring for nature is perhaps one of the best ways I know of to experience some the better sense of what it means to be human.  Listen to the “tree-huggers”; they are on the right track.

Update: 22 April 2010

Since receiving the good news about the grebe’s recovery and looking more closely at the photos Denise took, it’s possible to see some of the damage left by the plastic netting.  The two photos below bear this out.  The photo on the left was taken before the incident, on 09 April.   The bird had been feeding and it’s head was wet, but compare the corner of its mouth with the photo of the same bird on 19 April, shortly after its release:

Pictures of “our” pied-billed grebe, before and after being entangled in some discarded plastic mesh. The “after” photo on the right shows injuries at the corner of the mouth. Photos by Denise Greaves. Click to enlarge.

The marks left by the plastic strands that were caught in the corner of the bird’s mouth are still visible, especially if you enlarge the photo. When we caught the bird, we also noticed a rather ugly cut on its tongue, but apparently that injury looked worse than it was.

In any case, we’re glad to see our friend back in its accustomed haunts.