Well what a day for me, new job and an injured doo to deal with. Yesterday we spotted one of the newest doos, Fondoo, was limping badly. Falling over onto one leg in fact and through the binoculars we saw that he had lost feathers from his breast and had a large open wound at the top of his leg. Luckily Fondoo is one of the few doos that sleeps in the cote so after he went to bed I was able to catch him. The wound looked awful so we kept him in the new cat cage and today I contacted Harry my lovely Pigeon Pal.
Harry has just left after coming and instructing me in the fine art of doo stitching. Firstly we cleaned the wound and then removed all the torn feathers, then pulling the edges of the gaping wound open I put in four silk stitches. Harry held the doo as he knew how to restrain it without crushing it! Luckily I had surgical sutures in sealed packs with attached surgical needles. The reason I had the suture sets was that when we bought the boat in it we found the worlds oldest First Aid Kit, it contained such delights as a Umbilical Cord Clamp, lots of suture sets, expiry date 1965, a silver tracheostomy tube, Brooks Airways various sizes, Mucous Extractors and a War Office , Army Medical Department Shell Dressing dated April September 1945. The previous owner of the boat had been a Doctor funnily enough.
Anyway Fondoo is now in recovery and will remain inside for a week or so until he puts his leg down, he seemed quite unperturbed about the sewing going on and should make a full recovery. the stitches will remain and be absorbed eventually.
I thought that the hawk had had a go at Fondoo but Harry seemed to think it was more likely a close encounter with a wire or a branch or a particularly bad landing into a tree. Fondoo had only been out of the nest box a week so maybe was just inept at landing and should not have been flying solo just yet!
Tomorrow I will attempt to get some good gory close up pictures for the blog.
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