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Against The Odds
Despite the Suncoast Seabird Sanctuary's standing as a famous avian rehabilitation center, the facility is not without its share of controversy.
So I visited two emergency rooms in one day last week.
In the morning, I stopped into the Suncoast Seabird Sanctuary's critical care center where volunteers and staff treat a menagerie of injured pelicans, ospreys and seagulls. Later that evening, I escorted my grandmother, injured in a car accident, to Bayfront Hospital, a mare's nest of doctors, nurses and human patients.
Not surprisingly, emergency rooms are uncomfortable places for avians and humans alike. For one, they smell funny: The Sanctuary reeked of dead fish heads and Bayfront of cleaning supplies and human fluids. ERs are also loud: I listened to squawking seagulls in the morning and the screams of a woman undergoing a spinal tap in the evening. And the junk food in Bayfront's vending machines was as inedible for humans as the bird food being served at the Sanctuary.
Despite this, spending time in ERs on the frontlines of life and death is an extraordinary experience. Bayfront is considered one of the best hospitals in the area, with 2,000 employees serving hundreds of people a day. The Sanctuary is world-renowned for its rehabilitation of seabirds -- close to 10,000 a year -- staffed by a skeleton crew of paid employees and nearly 150 charitable volunteers.
And then there's the most obvious similarity: Nothing beats leaving them alive.
Barbara Suto calmly grasps an injured cormorant. The slick black seabird struggles for a moment but quickly gives up as Suto begins to clean a nasty gash on its leg. She is not sure what caused the wound -- fishing line is likely -- but expects the cormorant to recover in a week or so. Birds are hardy little creatures, she informs me. They have the unique ability to "localize" wounds and minimize the spread of infection.
As she bandages the small bird up, three injured pelicans waddle around the perimeter of the Suncoast Seabird Sanctuary's emergency room, their webbed feet loudly slapping against the tile. They deftly avoid the hands of a volunteer. Seagulls call out constantly from some of the cages lining the walls. The egrets and herons remain silent behind blanket-covered coops. Visitors who come to see the hawks, owls and pelicans who live at the Sanctuary rarely get to see this aspect of the organization: the emergency bird docs in action.
"It's like a M.A.S.H. unit sometimes," says Ralph Heath Jr., who founded the Suncoast Seabird Sanctuary in 1971 after finding a cormorant dragging a broken wing across Gulf Boulevard.
Each patient here has its own harrowing story: the vulture smacked by a car while feeding on roadkill; the pelicans snagged by hooks and fishing line; the hawk shot by an irresponsible gun owner looking for a target; the cormorant hooked and hung by a fisherman from the Skyway pier. Some birds look angry, others just peer out weakly.
Then there are the gannets, large black and white migrating seabirds. Nobody knows why they are here.
"Gannets have been dying all along the coast," Suto explains. "There are thousands that have died. There are no answers yet. They're just starving."
The gannets are not alone. Suto says illnesses are much more common than traumas these days, a definite switch from when she first began treating birds in the 1980s.
"You can't pin it on one particular thing," she says. "There are so many toxins in the environment, and it accumulates in these birds."
She opens up a cage covered by a blanket to reveal a large grey and white osprey. The bird hangs limp, its head resting on a towel as it stares up terrified with glassy, half-closed eyes.
"This is an exposure to something, not sure what," she says about the bird, dropped off last night. "Unless you know which type of toxin it is, [diagnosing the bird] gets extremely difficult."
Suto says that today's birds, like the coalmine canaries of yesterday, are likewise "environmental indicators."
"If they aren't going to make it," she says, her eyes fierce as a hawk's, "we aren't going to make it."
There are all types of species in the Bayfront Medical Center's emergency room: a homeless man bragging about how many times he's been stabbed; a teary young girl in her pajamas; an older gentleman wearing sunglasses and clutching a bag of Kentucky Fried Chicken; and my 83-year-old grandmother, smiling and chatting about her accident while she suffers with five broken ribs and internal bleeding (she didn't know this yet).
"You're a tough old bird," a receptionist tells her.
Nurses and doctors scurry around the trauma unit, stopping to make sure patients' needs are taken care of. Through conversations and eavesdropping, I deduce most of the cases here tonight are also illnesses caused by toxins -- mainly, the food we eat. Large women complain of heart disease and asthma. One man suffered a heart attack. There are smokers and drinkers. And those trying to sneak in hamburgers.
Just like at the Sanctuary, there are angry sick patients and those resigned to their condition.
Finally, after waiting four hours for a diagnosis, my grandmother gets the word: a trauma surgeon informs her that she'll need to have a tube inserted to drain the blood pushing against her lung. She'll have to stay overnight. The look of terror on her face isn't unlike that of the osprey I saw earlier in the day.
When I visit my grandmother the next day, she's back to her old stubborn self, turning down pain medication and asking when she can go home. She'll make a full recovery, doctors say, although she'll have to stay in the hospital a few days.
I'm reminded of Pat the Pelican, who came to the Suncoast Seabird Sanctuary in 1975, after the late actor Pat O'Brien saved the dying chick from a hook and line that had blinded and crippled her. Thirty-two years later (brown pelicans usually live only to 20), Pat is still shuffling around her sandy home at the Sanctuary among the other geriatric residents, though she's completely blind now.
Like that receptionist said, tough old birds.
