Injured pelican recovers after treatment at Macksville vet clinic

A couple of weeks ago, Mr Percival was a sore and sorry ‘peli-can’t’; the poor boy was found by local anglers down at Fisherman’s Reach with a rather sizeable hole in his bill, which was proving to be a rather large snag at dinner time.

After a week of failing to lure the wily waterbird into shore, the local WIRES avian expert finally managed to tempt the traumatised fish-guzzler with the notion of a free lunch.

The injured peli was taken to Macksville MidCoast Vets, where Dr Kristie Neale looked over his injuries.

“I don’t know for sure but I suspect he had either caught something in his beak that fought to get out again – which happens quite often – or perhaps he had gone to take a fish which was already on a hook,” she said.

“By the time they caught him he was quite skinny and the wound was completely sealed over – I estimate he was injured around 10 days before they managed to catch him.”

And he would have had a devil of a time trying to feed himself with the holey mess his beak was in.

“When they dive for food the whole bottom of that beak part balloons out to around the size of their body. They then filter out the water and what is left in the beak is eaten. But everything in his beak would have fallen out,” she said.

Dr Kristie then set about educating herself on proper pelican protocol.

While she has treated quite a few pelicans in her time –  including one famous case quite a few years back where a local bird had been pierced clean through by an arrow – she needed to ring Sea World to consult about the appropriate general anaesthetic needed to prep him for surgery.

“And the gular skin pouch (the skin the joins the upper and lower beak) is so stretchy. I wanted to find out the best suture material and surgical pattern to use. The information I received gave me the confidence I needed to do what I had to do,” she said.

“I popped a catheter into one of the veins in his wing and slid a tube down his throat, and kept him asleep on the gas while I stitched him back up.”

“And he did really really well.”

Mr Percival, as Dr Kristie named him after the famous character on Storm Boy, was then cared for by the local WIRES bird expert until he rehabilitated, before being released back near Stuarts Point where he was originally discovered.

As it turns out, a fellow veterinarian from the Nambucca Heads clinic was out walking along the river near Gordon Park about a week ago when she noticed a rather obvious suture line in the bill of one of the pelicans gathered around – it was him!

“When she told me I was laughing so much –  I was just so thrilled!” Dr Kristie said.

“We treat a lot of wildlife here and then hand them over to the WIRES carers – who do an incredible job. But we don’t often get any feedback, so to hear that such a magnificent animal is back in the wild, and expressing all the natural behaviours that he’s meant to, I was stoked!

“Every time I think about him I just think what an awesome dude he was.”