This Week at Liberty

We’re in for a brief history lesson on—you guessed it—fishing. For nearly 40,000 years, humans have, in some way, hunted fish. Ancient Egyptians used woven nets, harpoons and hooks to catch fish in the Nile; in China, a silk line with a hook on a bamboo rod was used; Native Americans crafted hooks made of wood and bone; the list goes on and on and on.

It wasn’t until the 1600s that fishing tackle was recrafted for a running line to be used on a rod. In the late 1700s, a reel was created that was attached to a rod where a handle was turned. By the late 1800s, rods themselves became thinner and yes, stronger, by gluing strips of bamboo together. Silk was used as the line (rather than horsehair), and this trend continued throughout the 1900s to what we have today.

This is, essentially, all fine. Modern times call for modern tools. The issue arises when these modern tools aren’t taken out of the wild. Depending on the fishing line, some types can take years to degrade; fishing hooks sometimes upwards of five years. And where does it all go, when it’s left for nature to deal with it?

Oftentimes, in, on, and around animals.

This Great-Blue Heron came in with exactly this issue—fishing line wrapped around both legs, with two treble hooks (three-pronged hooks) imbedded in the tops of both feet. Unable to hunt as needed, this large water bird (who relies on its long legs to wade through shallow water to hunt) came in emaciated, dehydrated, and lethargic. Medical service volunteers were able to successfully remove both hooks, and radiographs confirmed no fractures but soft-tissue damage with open wounds on the feet where the hooks had been (for who knows how long).

In a perfect case, this bird would have recuperated in ICU, in a warm, dark, quiet environment with antibiotics and autoinflammatory meds and a wrap around the feet to care for the lesions. He would have been fed an appropriate diet to get him back to a healthy weight, then moved to a flight cage outside once healthy to work on his flight muscles, until finally, he’d be released back out into the wild.

Unfortunately, this isn’t a perfect case. This beautiful bird didn’t make it through his first day here—as emaciated as he was, it’s likely he was down for quite some time before our team had been notified of him. By this time, the bird’s body was breaking down, trying to find nutrients it doesn’t have to sustain itself to keep going.

This is the nature of our work. For all of our success stories, there are those we cannot save. It is a reality we face here at Liberty Wildlife, and one we will continue to endure simply because it means we’re trying.

And honestly, that’s all we can all do in a world where most things are uncertain. But the one certain thing we can do is to leave the world better than we found it—if you find yourself fishing, double and triple check you have all your equipment before leaving.

You never know, it might just save a life.

Resource: A Brief History of Fishing – Images

By: Acacia Parker | Public Outreach Coordinator