Rapid Assessment of Body Condition in a White-Necked Heron, Ardea cocoi.

As a Field Biologist, Conservation Biologist, Ornithologist and Veterinary Student all rolled into one, one of the skills I have acquired recently is the ability to carry out a physical assessment, to a greater or lesser extent and as the opportunity comes my way, on a wild animal.

This week beginning Monday 30^th March 2015 was a case in point. Let me explain myself. I made the acquaintance of a White-Necked Heron, Ardea cocoi, here at my university veterinary hospital in Central-Western Brazil. This bird looks for all the World like a common-or-garden British Grey Heron. Similar size and feed habits and life history.  But for me it was a new species, by which I mean not in the scientific sense but for me personally. If that makes me sound like a twitcher then that is absolutely fine by me. This status thus earns Ardea cocoi an article all to itself on this blog.

At the time I was part of a group of fellow final-year veterinary students and had no time – as so often happens at this stage of the course – to carry out what veterinary surgeons call a full clinical examination. But fellow birders will share with me an appreciation of the ‘wow’ factor that all ornithologists know and love when coming across a species that is new to them for the first time. And my particular encounter with this heron took me back to my days ringing wetland birds at Sir Peter Scott’s Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust reserve at Slimbridge in Gloucestershire, UK.

Trouble was, my brief encounter with this Brazilian White-Necked Heron was all-too-brief. It made one rather half-hearted lunge from its recovery cage at the hospital at my gloved hand with its rapier-like beak. Then sort of gave up and offered no further resistence, not even so much as a vocalisation, rare in a wild bird. When I picked it up and manoeuvred it in order to tuck it safely and securely under my arm, I was physically shocked (a feeling that is becoming depressingly familiar to me as a person who wants to specialise in a veterinary capacity with wild species), to feel every rib in its rib cage. Soon it was put back in its cage but died the next day.

Its death has not been in vain, but it is a fact of a veterinarian’s life that patients do die. Whether this is especially true of wild patients, well, that is hard to say but maybe qualified veterinarians or rehabilitators will have an opinion.