ours goes to eleven

[boxofdelights]

The saddest turkey vulture I have ever seen came in to the raptor center last week. They tried twice to do a blood test for lead poisoning, but the machine just said ERROR. So they took another sample and sent it over to CSU. Their machine said, even for a turkey vulture, that is a lethal lead level. For a bald eagle, 0.2 ppm of lead in the blood is toxic, 1 ppm is lethal. Turkey vultures are tougher, but this bird's blood had 11.8 ppm of lead.

For lead poisoning, we do chelation. It takes I think seven weeks. For a level that high, we're definitely going to have to do it more than once. While that's going on, we have to try to keep the bird's organs from shutting down.

As long as the bird keeps telling us I ATEN'T DEAD YET we'll keep working.

Comments

[twistedchick]

I hope that your vulture pulls through this and isn't so distressed that it starts barfing its food (which they do when they feel upset or threatened.) Where it's being treated, it's probably getting something like wet dog food, right? Has to be on an equivalent level with gourmet roadkill.

*thinking good thoughts for a large feathered dinosaur descendant*

[boxofdelights]

The lead poisoning makes its digestive tract stop processing, so the rehabbers had to put a tube into its crop and suck out the putrefying food in there, which smelled as bad as you might imagine. Right now it's getting "liquid carnivore diet", straight into the stomach (bypassing the crop). It still smells pretty bad.