Saugus Animal Hospital vets tending to bird’s broken wing

SAUGUS – The Saugus Animal Hospital on Route 1 is hoping an injured Red-tailed hawk will be back in the air soon after treating it for a broken wing earlier this week.Stephen Laliberte, a technician at the animal hospital, said local raptor rehabilitators brought the injured hawk to the hospital.”Usually what happens is animal control or a Good Samaritan will bring an owl or a hawk into us and if it’s savable it will go to the (rehabilitators) for rehabilitation,” he said. “But this time it worked the opposite way. He brought the hawk in first to be evaluated because it appeared to have a broken wing.”Laliberte said doctors assessed the hawk to make sure he wasn’t in shock before X-raying his wing.”Doctors check to make sure it’s not in immediate pain or in danger of dying immediately,” he said. “In this case it wasn’t. The hawk had a good feisty attitude. It was pretty obvious from looking at it that it was a break, it was just a matter of where.”An X-ray found a broken ulna, and Laliberte said its wing was wrapped in a figure eight bandage and the hawk was sent for rehabilitation.”They’ll keep the bandage on and keep it stable,” said Laliberte. “The idea is to keep it as quiet as possible so it’s not flapping around. If he was still in the wild he wouldn’t have survived because he couldn’t fly at that point. For them to hunt they have to be airborne so he would have starved to death.”Laliberte said he’s hopeful the wing will heal and the hawk can be released back into the wild soon.”Obviously it has to be fed and cared for, but you don’t want any kind of bonding with a human because the goal is to release it back into the wild,” he said. “He’ll come back here to be evaluated and be re-X-rayed. The small bones in a bird’s wing can heal on their own if it’s kind of set and they’re immobile.”Laliberte said the Saugus Animal Hospital often treats wild animals like opossums, squirrels and other raptors.”In the summer months, I’d say we see probably at least half- a-dozen different raptors,” said Laliberte. “We got a lot of sea birds this year for some reason, some that weren’t indigenous to this area. We had that storm a few weeks back and had two birds in one week that are native to the Arctic that migrate and were blown off their course.”Matt Tempesta can be reached at [email protected].