The Accipiter - Vets Corner July 2005

Vet's Corner - July 2005

John Chitty, the park’s vet, gives us some insight into the healthcare and maintenance of raptors as well as the injuries and illnesses that they fall victim to, and how he treats them...

In this article, John gives us some insight into the rôle of the vet in a modern zoological collection

The Vet and the Conservancy

It is often asked (especially by Ashley!) what the vet actually does at the Conservancy. Essentially we have many roles.

The obvious one is treating sick birds. This involves both the captive birds in the collection and wild injured birds that are brought into the hospital. The collection birds, fortunately, are generally healthy although we do treat the usual type of injuries and infections that occur in all falconry birds. The majority of the sick birds we see are the wild ones. Most of these are severely ill or injured so, sadly, there is often little we can do. However, for the others we often needing to repair complex injuries or advanced malnutrition/starvation.

The real aim of our work is, naturally, preventive medicine.
In an ideal world we would never treat sick birds – however, the world is far from ideal!

Preventive medicine takes many forms

Husbandry. Certain husbandry methods are more likely to result in injury or illness.
John Chitty checking out a wild Buzzard in the hospital

Anti-parasitic strategies. Birds of prey will “collect” parasites, both internal and external – invertebrates in the soil and wild birds being the main sources. For internal parasites all the birds on the park are dewormed once or twice a year. The drugs used are varied to reduce the chances of drug resistance. We also routinely check faecal samples to ensure strategies are working. External parasites are also regularly treated as lice, mites and the dreaded flatflies are a problem. Flatflies and biting flies (mosquitoes, gnats, etc) can carry blood parasites (especially Leucocytozoon and avian malaria) so we have to be especially careful in late summer/autumn. Fortunately we have not seen disease due to blood parasites for many years. It also good that the deer are now happy to take “drugged” treats from everyone – in the first few years we had to anaesthetise them via dart to give them an annual check and deworm by injection.
Vaccination. This is only rarely used in raptors in the UK. Our main concern came during the last Newcastle Disease outbreak when emergency supplies of vaccine had to be ordered so we could vaccinate all the birds if disease came too close.
Diet. The standard of diet given to the birds on the park is extremely good and we are able to fulfil the vast majority of the birds’ needs using a varied good quality diet. However, at certain stages, they need extra supplementation so we supply vitamin/mineral supplements especially before and during the egg-laying season. Naturally in a diverse collection there are diverse needs and young vultures require their food to be pre-digested – an enzyme supplement designed to help dogs with pancreatic insufficiency is used to do this.
Quarantine. The collection is, basically, healthy. We therefore need to keep disease out. All new birds are, therefore, quarantined. This period gives us a chance to screen faeces for parasites and disease-causing bacteria (eg avian TB or Salmonella spp) as well giving the birds a check over and, in some cases, taking blood samples.

To achieve this we visit the park at least once a week to check cases and to see any new injured birds that have been brought in, as well those “fire brigade” cases that are brought into our clinic in Andover.
We will also try to always be on the end of a phone for urgent advice!

John Chitty BVetMed CertZooMed MRCVS

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