An Alligator in the Bathroom...And Other Stories Page 14

  The activity was constant. Carol and I had no social life at this time of year. Every non-working moment was spent feeding, mucking out and treating just about every species in the book, morning, noon and night. Carol did most of the looking after of our two children as well. We were young and foolish. We just got on with it, mashing up worms to feed to baby birds, giving a baby hedgehog its breakfast milk with a syringe, and it was absolutely great.

  Right from the beginning I’d spent lots of time at scientific gatherings and symposiums about wildlife rehabilitation. I’d read every learned article on the subject and talked to every expert I could find, so when spring came around I felt well prepared, for the usual and for the inevitable surprises that Mother Nature would throw at me every year.

  An adult buzzard had a broken wing. The vet put a splint on it but it was going to be weeks, maybe months, before it was fit enough to go back into the wild. I didn’t then know that raptors, and some other species such as parrots, imprint on the person caring for them. It’s not like young geese who will follow you everywhere thinking you’re their mother. This is sexual imprinting. Regardless of your own gender, the bird regards you as its mate and, as with our own species, various important attitudes come along with that relationship.

  When the buzzard was well enough to be moved out of the garage my options were quite limited. Obviously a large bird of prey couldn’t go in the aviary with the other birds, so I got hold of a bow perch and a few more falconry requisites. A bow perch is basically a steel semicircular hoop with both ends in the ground. The perching bit has a thick covering, usually rubber, and the bird is on a short leash.

  After a long time indoors, my buzzard needed to go through a process called weathering, aptly named because that’s what happens. Some ill-informed people think that tethering a raptor for long periods on a perch is cruel, but that’s what it does in the wild. It hunts, feeds, then snoozes on its perch for hours. So, I fed it, it went into its usual post-prandial, semi-somnolent state, then perched, busy doing nothing.

  I should have noticed something odd one day when Carol was mowing the lawn while I was fiddling about in the aviary. The buzzard hadn’t been out long and had not got around to any kind of proper flying. Generally it jumped off its perch, flapped around a bit, then hopped back on. This time, it was like a puppy dog on a leash, straining and pulling towards Carol as she moved up and down the garden.

  My turn to mow the lawn next week, and I had daughter Katie with me on a beautiful sunny summer’s day. Neither she nor Carter junior had any childish fear of strange animals, hardly surprisingly, and even something as big and rather special as an adult buzzard could not overawe my little nine-year-old.

  She went right up to it and bent down to have a close look. It did something new. It flew straight up, into her face, and grabbed hold of her with its talons. Of course she screamed in terror, and of course I had the buzzard off her in seconds, but her face was lacerated. Luckily, the talons seemed to have missed her eyes and, by the time we’d cleaned her up and got her to A & E, she’d stopped crying and was being brave and calm.

  The doctor gave me quite a lecture on professionalism as regards wild animals, health, safety and so on, which had Carol nodding in agreement. When all the coals had been hauled over, he announced that he would have to stitch Katie’s eyelid. There was a small tear in the lower part of the lid, and he told Katie that it wouldn’t hurt very much.

  She nodded her agreement too, and the doc went to work. He’d been on the job five seconds when there was a loud thump behind us, as Carol hit the floor in a total faint. Doc had to leave Katie while he attended to Carol, who came round quite quickly, and brave daughter never flinched as he completed that part of the family treatment.

  Carol was never one for opening old wounds or criticising those unfortunates who remember too late to shut the stable door, but this was her daughter who could have lost an eye and been disfigured for life. It was some time before the lamps of peace burned brightly again, without flickering.

  During my wildlife high season, the first thing I did on coming home from the day’s calls was check what was in the hallway. Anything brought in during the day would have been left there in a basket or cage by Carol, after receiving first aid as required, for me to decide what to do with it. I came home one day to find nothing in the hall but a very powerful smell in the air. It took me back to my childhood in Hull, the fish docks, the fish-meal factories – what was going on?

  ‘Look in the bathroom,’ came a shout from the kitchen, with an unspoken ‘and get it sorted quick’ added on the end. I looked as bidden, and saw a half-grown common seal having a cold bath. When seal pups are washed up on the shore, nine times out of ten they’ll be washed back again and will find their mothers but people will pick them up and take them elsewhere, by which time it’s too late to put them back where they were. Some kind person from the next village had been on a trip to the seaside and, finding it stranded on the sand, had brought this seal back in the car.

  I went to the animal-food deep-freeze and took out some herrings.

  ‘And where are you going with those?’ said Carol.

  ‘I’m going to feed the seal,’ said I.

  ‘No you’re not,’ said Carol. ‘You’re going to put that animal in your van and you’re going to drive it to the coast and put it back in the water. You can have your tea when you get back. I’ll leave it in the oven when I go to bed.’

  ‘I can’t do that. It’ll never find its mother now.’

  ‘I’ll be finding my mother very shortly, and her spare room.’

  ‘Be reasonable, Carol. Look, it doesn’t have to be in the bath.’

  ‘I thought its skin had to be kept wet.’

  ‘No, that’s porpoises. It’ll be all right in the garage.’

  Obviously it was my fault that I hadn’t told Carol in advance that seals didn’t need to be kept in water. It lived in the garage in a large-size Vari Kennel (proprietary plastic kennel) for a month and more with the window open, and when it was fat and grown up enough I drove it to the nearest seaside and off it went.

  Anyway, at least the bathroom was free for a while, until the great crested grebe arrived. These are fabulous birds, lake dwellers, with amazing plumage around their heads and necks that was a fatal attraction to Victorian ladies’ bonnet makers, so much so that the bird almost became extinct in the UK until the RSPB was set up to protect it. Mine had a damaged wing, nothing too serious but it wouldn’t be able to fly for a week or two. The problem I had was, it wouldn’t eat. I had sild, whitebait, which it ignored when I dangled it, and still ignored when I put it in a bowl of water. I had to restort to force-feeding, which really wasn’t very satisfactory, until I had an idea. What if my bird saw the fish while it was swimming? I mean, while the bird was swimming; I didn’t have any live fish.

  Without discussing my idea with my wife, I filled the bath, put some fish in the bottom, and gently placed my grebe on the water. At first it just paddled around, splashing its feathers, preening, doing what it would normally do on the lake, then it saw the fish. Down it dived, up it came, shook itself dry and swallowed the food. I was in ten kinds of delight, not only that the feeding problem had been solved, but because it had been my own genius of an idea that had solved it.

  So pleased was I that I might have kept the bird longer than was strictly necessary, giving it two fish-baths a day, but fish, fowl and bathrooms do not mix in the eyes, minds and noses of mothers of small children, and I had to launch my great crested grebe back onto its home waters in the nature reserve.

  18

  HOW TO DROWN A SWAN

  Rehabilitation of small birds is generally a simple matter. You just take your sparrow, robin, thrush, whatever, to a suitable spot and let it go. Without mother to show it, even the youngest ones have the necessary instincts for finding food. It’s different with birds of prey. Fledglings brought to me would be used to having their food delivered and would not have had the cha
nce to develop their hunting skills. They needed what we call a soft release.

  The predator species I saw the most of was my boyhood friend, the tawny owl. The typical nest is in a hole in a tree, and where there are three chicks, often the case, things can get crowded. The parents feed the chicks for weeks after they’re fledged so they get big and one might fall out. I’d have maybe a dozen or more young tawnies brought to me every season, and I had to devise a system especially for them. The two essentials were food and temporary accommodation. Food was not a problem; we had a hatchery near us where they bred laying hens for egg production. The practice was (and is) to sex the chicks at a day old and kill the males, which was done there by gas, and which gave me a steady and free supply of food for owls, snakes and other carnivores.

  Accommodation also proved to be easy, as a friendly farmer was happy to install the young owls in a barn with an open window. I’d have already got them used to having chicks for dinner, so we could place one or two outside the window, on the ledge at first, then further away as the bird grew up into flying. The owl would go out for longer and longer periods, coming back to the barn every time, until it cottoned on to the notion of foraging for itself, becoming less and less dependent on the chicks we left, and set off to find its own territory and a mate.

  ‘We’ in this case was the farmer’s daughter and me. She took a great interest in the process and had her reward when the owls came back to see her, and perched on her bedroom window sill in the morning when she got up for school.

  The course of life for an RSPCA inspector never did run smooth, well, not mine anyway, but I had no suspicions when the phone rang and I was asked for my advice about the soft release of a young owl. The woman sounded very down to earth, no nonsense, was obviously a committed bird lover and experienced with other sorts of birds if not owls, so it was a bit of a shock when I met her. She asked me to call at her house to see the birds she had; I imagined a homemade aviary in a back garden.

  I found the address, in a part of Scorswick I rarely visited where all the houses were large detacheds with long driveways. In this driveway was a top-of-the-range Mercedes convertible, and the lady who answered the door was exactly the glamorous, expensively dressed type you might expect to see driving such a car in designer shades and Hermes headscarf. She introduced herself as Linda, and took me to her aviary. Another shock.

  It wasn’t in the garden. It was in a very expansive and expensively fitted kitchen, with solid oak units all around the walls. She explained that she had only recently taken up bird rescue as an interest, and she hadn’t known what to do with the first one she’d rescued, so she’d taken the door off one of the units and nailed a piece of chicken wire in its place. Over the previous summer, she’d done this to more and more units until her kitchen was full of birds making a terrific racket. The fridge and the cooker were still visible but I have no idea where she kept her pots and pans.

  Although she could see the need for a proper aviary long term, she thought the current arrangements were fine for now and was happy to spend many hours every day feeding and mucking out, wearing clothes that would have cost my year’s salary for one outfit. Naturally I wondered what her husband thought about it all, but he was a showbiz agent who spent a lot of time in London and, it seemed, his opinions didn’t really count anyway.

  Linda became my unpaid bird assistant. If there was a call to a bird in trouble and I couldn’t get there quickly, I’d phone her and she would go in her Merc to pick it up, take it to the vet as necessary, and pay the bill. On a couple of occasions when my van was in for a service, she lent me the Merc as my duty vehicle, not minding at all how many mangy dogs or flea-ridden hedgehogs I had in the back. Of course it caused a few problems. There are people in certain parts of Yorkshire who will not believe that a man in RSPCA uniform but also in the latest-model Mercedes convertible, can be anything other than an imposter, a con merchant out to work some sort of fiddle. RSPCA? Oh aye. Pull t’other one, it’s got bells on.

  Having an assistant (unpaid) was a great help, but assistants need to be trained. A call came in that I thought I could use a hand with, and it would be good experience for Linda, so I arranged to meet her beside a lake in the town’s main park where a swan was reported with fishing line around its leg. This happened all the time and, usually, the birds so entangled are fairly easy to catch and deal with, but this one only had the line around one leg and had no difficulty flying away whenever we got near to it in the rowing boat lent us by the park keeper.

  Thinking of Percy the Porpoise, I could see we were in for a frustrating time. I had my swan hook, which was a device rather like a shepherd’s crook, and while I did the rowing, Linda wielded the hook. Back and forth we went, with the swan taking off as soon as Linda had it in range, to land again maybe twenty yards away.

  Swan-catcher Linda had heard stories about these powerful birds breaking people’s arms and legs, but I told her all that hissing and flapping was mostly bravado and, if and when we caught it, so long as we kept a hold on the wings we’d have no problems with broken bones. As well as hissing and flapping, we were also hearing shouts of amused encouragement from people in the park, including Carol who happened to be taking the children for a bike ride. They all thought this the funniest thing they’d seen in weeks.

  Linda and I had to give up and come back the next day when, after another exhausting few hours, we eventually did manage to catch our prey. Some of the fishing line was wrapped very tightly round its leg, so tightly in fact that the skin had started to grow over it so we couldn’t just pull it off. Linda said, ‘Vet,’ and off we went, to my friend who usually did wildlife work for nothing (though Linda would pay anyway if he did charge us).

  We were more than surprised when he said the only way to save the swan was to amputate the leg. This was something I’d never come across before and I had no idea what the consequences might be, but he was insistent. I later discovered that nobody else of my acquaintance in the animal world had ever heard of such a thing either, and we would soon find out why.

  The operation itself was risky, not the surgery but the anaesthetics. Little was understood in those days about anaesthetising birds and such matters were notoriously difficult to manage. We needn’t have worried because it all went well and soon we had a swan with one good leg plus paddle and one much shorter stump.

  I kept the swan in my garage rescue home for three weeks, feeding it on dry dog food that had maize in it, which I floated on water so the swan could skim it off. When I thought the bird was fit enough, I called Linda and we took it down to familiar territory, the lake in the park, not quite knowing what would happen. I expected it to swim in circles until it worked out what to do in a natural way. Big birds like swans and geese have their legs spaced wide apart, which is why they walk in such a comical way, as if they have two wooden sailor’s peg-legs. Our swan had shown no ability whatever in improvising one-legged movement on land, but surely that would happen once it had mastered one-paddle swimming.

  Linda was a bit of a star in the local paper, always being photographed with a rescued kingfisher while looking a million dollars, so my dear friend the badger photographer was delighted when Linda phoned him and told him the story.

  He stayed on the shore while Linda and I put on waders and set off with our swan. Posing carefully for the camera, we placed it in the water and watched in dismay as it tipped over on its non-leg side, flapped its wings madly and did its best to start drowning. Four times we tried, and every time it did exactly the same, now with a small crowd watching. How do you drown the queen of waterfowl? Give her to the RSPCA to cut her leg off.

  Temporarily beaten, Linda went back to her kitchen units and I to my garage with the swan, deeply concerned that we were going to have to do what maybe a different vet would have done anyway, which was euthanise it.

  Next day we tried again, and the next. There was no swan whisperer to call on, and no incentive we could use to teach our swan to swim with
one leg, or even to stay upright, but Linda would never admit defeat and neither would I. After many trips to the lake, the swan learned to lean over to its legside and stay up, which was when I saw I’d got something right. It did indeed swim in circles.

  After a few days of that it taught itself how to swim where it wanted to swim, and so we could be happy that it was going to cope. Swans can stay on the water indefinitely if there’s enough food, and really only need to come out to breed and that, we felt, was something we could worry about later. Our swan became a celebrity, the famous one-legged swan of Scorswick Park, and probably the most photographed swan in history.

  19

  MAKING A (VERY) BAD IMPRESSION

  Before I joined the RSPCA, there was a scheme that paid inspectors for getting publicity – so much for a local press article, so much for the nationals, TV, radio and so on. This had stopped by the time I became an inspector but publicity remained an important part of the job, even if we weren’t paid for it. Public donations made the RSPCA – and therefore my job – possible, and I took every opportunity I could. As a consequence, I became well known through, and had excellent relations with, the local papers and radio. They tried to give my stories good coverage, and often came to me when they were short, looking for a bit of animal magic to fill a space. I made sure that animal cruelty cases always featured strongly, and sometimes used a little tear-jerking to find a home for a lost pet.

  In the run-up to Christmas, I made sure that there was something in all the local media about the potential disaster of buying someone, especially a child, a puppy or kitten as a present. That doesn’t happen so much now but back then it was quite common, as were the frequent consequences, of an unwanted animal brought into the RSPCA, or tied to a farm gate and abandoned, or tied up in a sack and thrown in the river.