My First Case From Start To Finish

Last week, for the first time, I got to see a case through from rescue to release.
It was one of the most rewarding experiences of my life.

The day I started at the Swan Rescue, I got a call from Mary who had received an emergency call from a woman in Connemara who had found an injured swan on her land.
We drove out to their farm that day (a beautiful kestrel swooped right past the windscreen! :D) to assess the situation.
It was a young female, approximately a year old - she had a grey bill and still had some grey fluff under her wings.
The woman who found her had put her in a nice quiet space in the garage with straw and some grain based food in water and had fenced her in to protect her. She had got stuck in a fence after colliding with some over head power lines. Mary examined her and found a huge wound on her wing, with half of the bone exposed! It appeared to be a relatively old wound, though there was no sign of infection. She had some other fresh wounds on her other wing too and was extremely thin.
We thanked the family and brought her back to the sanctuary for the night.
The next day we brought her to the vet to get a full examination. She was prescribed a course of antibiotics and time to rest at the sanctuary.
She responded well to the antibiotics, which Mary administered daily, and she was eating well. She quickly recovered her strength - every morning at feeding time she would already be standing right in front of the gate waiting and giving out and would nearly snatch the food dish right out of my hand!

She stayed with us for 9 weeks and put on plenty of weight. By the time it came to release her I could barely lift her out to the van! She looked very confused - the poor thing probably thought  she was getting more injections!

We brought her down to The Claddagh to be released. There are no breeding pairs there and plenty of food and an opportunity to meet a mate, so there is no aggression. Here, she will have the time to recover fully and learn to be independent again. She may never be a good flier, so we could not release her back to where she came from.
I didn't realise that I would miss her when she left, but she took up so much room in our tiny sanctuary that it felt very empty with just the 6 ducklings!

Here is the moment she became a Claddagh swan:

Galway & Claddagh Swan Rescue

Registered Charity no: CHY 14904
Emergency Ph: 086 382 6471

http://maryjoyceglynn.blogspot.ie/

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Galway & Claddagh Swan Rescue

The swan rescue has been around for about a decade now. I believe it started when there was an oil spill in the harbour in Galway and a group of concerned citizens pooled together and recruited volunteers to come down to the docks and catch and clean the affected birds in a big shed on a very cold and snowy winter's night!

I was one of those volunteers.
Rubber gloves and Fairly liquid in hand, we got to work!
It was such a transformation from the dirty, black, weak, sad looking creatures to the bright-eyed, energetic, hopeful looking swans, preening and stretching their wings. Not one of them was aggressive towards the people cleaning them. Probably a combination of too weak to fight and maybe a small bit of realisation that we were no threat.
Being a 15 year old animal-crazy girl, I fell in love my swan a little bit and named her 'Misneach', which means courage as Gaeilge. I'm pretty sure I remember hugging her too...

Swans are apparently still protected in Ireland, and in Claddagh we have such a concentrated population.
But there was nothing in place to facilitate their protection.
The Swan Rescue started out as a small group of people dedicating their spare time, their own money and even their homes and back gardens to taking in injured birds and hand-rearing orphaned and abandoned cygnets.
They eventually set up as a proper charitable organisation, educated themselves on wildlife rehabilitation and got licensed by the National Parks and Wildlife Service.
Back in 2010 the City Council gave them a little patch of land, with a container in it, in one of the parks on the outskirts of the city. Then in early 2011 they were given planning permission to build a small aviary onto the side of the container. And viola! A sanctuary.
Babies that have to be hand-reared and any other birds that require 24 hour supervision are still kept in members' homes until they are ready to be kept at the sanctuary, which is tended to once or twice a day.

They are a very busy organisation in the spring and summer and they are on hand 24 hours a day, 365 days a year on their helpline to give advice or to take in a rescue case.

The new Twitter page
The Facebook page
Mary's Blog - A great resource for information on swans, ducks, seagulls and how to care for them. Also, all you need to know about the organisation, including registered charity number.

For info on the Claddagh:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claddagh
http://ilovegalway.com/claddagh.html

Please consider making a donation:
(Registered charity no: 14904)