A few Fridays ago brought an unusual phone call and an unexpected trip to the vets.
It was proving to be a fairly average Friday in the office until I got a phone call from a local Stromness family saying they had just rescued a bird of prey from the sea just off Hoy! The lad spotted it and they couldn’t quite believe what it was until they took it out of the water, totally exhausted and water logged.
Half an hour later they brought it in to the office, wrapped in a towel, beginning to dry out and shivering to stay warm. It turned out to be a young male peregrine falcon who had come out on the wrong side of an argument with a fulmar (fulmars spit their oily fishy stomach contents on anything that comes a little too close for comfort- a disaster for other birds as it strips their feathers of their waterproof coating), and had somehow ended up in the water.
We don’t normally deal with injured birds, passing calls on to the SSPCA but occasionally the rules have to be bent and this occasion was one of them! So there was a quick phone call to a local vets, a trip to Kirkwall and the peregrine was left in the hands of the professionals to get cleaned up and rehydrated. A local birder, who has experience in rehabilitating birds of prey, took it on for a few days to see if it would recover from its ordeal. During this time it was given a few food options and showed a particular preference to supermarket chicken! A few days later it was released on the Birsay moors and it made a successful first short flight.
Lets hope it doesn’t meet any more fulmars ...