Buzzard Rescue

(From last Thursday ...)

We spotted a "turkey buzzard" at the office last week and tried to catch it. Pretty big bird. He appeared to have an injured wing.

I have a friend - a guy - who works at Fort Myers airport with other guys. The airport is virtually across the main road from here. I emailed asking if he had any critter rescue people over there and he wrote back "hey - when we find wild animals, we don't call writers."

I snapped back "oh, I forgot you were one of the boys who was throwing rocks at clumps of grass in the twilight because you thought they were an alligator."

Somewhere during the emailing, the bird disappeared. We hoped he flew home.

He was large. I'm guessing he had a 5' wingspan.

Saw him again today, still walking ... much weaker. We were able to capture him after much screaming and thrashing. (Us.) Four of us chased him around the building ... then three of us cornered him, one threw a blanket towel over his head (it had a giant parrot on it, which some considered humorous) and put it in a big box.

People from the other offices had their noses pressed against the glass.

Rescuers included me, an account person and a media buyer. All female. The guy account person split mid-capture - the bird scared him. The boss gave us a look like he truly believed we were insane. He said "you know that's a vulture, right?!"

Yeah, we knew. We also discovered vultures smell like shit.

I drove him to the Crow sanctuary on Sanibel for repairs. It's about a 40 minute drive from work - www.crowclinic.org/ He was banging around in the box making me really nervous the whole way there.

I prayed my coworker had the box properly taped, I did not want to have him loose in my tiny Saturn. Apparently he had never been in a car before.

I mumbled Buddhist chants (with the occasional gross profanity) while driving. That actually seemed to calm him down a bit. Except for the profanity part.

Dropped him off, filled out the necessary intake forms and we hope they can fix him. Crow thanked me profusely for bringing him in. He has a patient number so we can check on him.

Back at the office I was running late for a big meeting. I made up jokes all the way back to the office about "flipping them the bird", "winging it", "eating crow" etc. Non-rescuing co-workers scoffed me upon my return.

Some horrible nickname may come from all this. "Buzzard Whisperer" or "Vulture Chanter" or something.

Then I had gung pao chicken for lunch, which felt sort of hypocritical.