“Yesterday, he was still standing there, proud and tall,” Lisa Daisey recalled on Tuesday. “I said, ‘Tomorrow morning, I’m going to make it happen.’”
Coastal Point • RUSLANA LAMBERT
This great blue heron lost its struggle for life when rescuers were not able to come to its aid earlier this week.
But Daisey’s efforts to save a great blue heron that had become entangled in some landscape netting came too late.
Several other residents of Millville and the surrounding area had noticed the distressed heron between Friday, May 18, and Monday, May 21, when it had ended up standing next to a stormwater retention pond on Club House Road, in front of the new White Creek at Bethany community.
Paul Brennan and Ed Booth spotted the large bird on Friday while they were in the area working in their electric business. “It was a gorgeous bird,” Booth recalled.
Coastal Point Publisher Susan Lyons said she had seen the bird just off Route 26 in Millville on Saturday. The large heron she spotted had the same green, twine-like material wrapped around its bill and neck that others later spotted on it at the White Creek location.
When Brennan and Booth saw the bird still entangled on the morning of Monday, May 21, they made a call to the Delaware Department of Natural Resources’ Division of Fish and Wildlife, informing them of the bird in distress.
“I said, ‘Now, he can fly, but he can’t eat.’ If a bird like that can’t eat, he’s going to die in a couple days,” Booth acknowledged.
They made a second call to DNREC around noon that day, Booth said, at which time they were told there was no record of their first call. A Fish and Wildlife officer did call them back, but with a response that didn’t satisfy Booth.
“He said, ‘There’s nothing we can do,’ and I got a little upset,” Booth said. “Here’s a great blue heron, all entangled, and they can’t go find him.”
Booth said DNREC officials referred them instead to Tri-State Bird Rescue & Research, a non-profit regional facility based in Newark, Del., that specializes in bird rescue but is staffed primarily by volunteers who augment a small professional staff.
The electricians said they were told by someone at Tri-State that they were already on a call in the Rehoboth area and would attempt to get to the entrapped heron later that day. “Here’s a gorgeous bird in trouble,” Booth said. “She was a nice lady, but all she said was, ‘I’ll try to stop by on the way back.’”
Brennan then called the Coastal Point, which sent news staff out to the site to document an anticipated rescue.
Wildlife experts unable
to respond to calls
Daisey also called Tri-State on Monday afternoon, concerned that the bird, which she believed she recognized from earlier sightings, was in dire need of help.
“I’ve seen this bird before, or at least I think it’s him. I’ve seen him for the past four years,” she said.
Daisey said that Tri-State had referred her to a Maryland bird rehabilitator who is based in Salisbury, but that woman had been too busy to come help the heron, she said. Daisey had to go out of town herself on Monday, but she decided that first thing Tuesday morning she’d do whatever she could to help the heron.
Coastal Point staff also considered a rescue effort on Monday afternoon, while waiting to document the anticipated rescue. But, told that professional rescuers were due on-site, they decided not to risk injuring or scaring away the bird before someone with expertise could arrive to assist. The bird was still waiting for help as evening arrived Monday.
“I can’t lay all the blame on Tri-State,” Daisey said in retrospect Tuesday, “because if I had asked the right questions, I think they would have given me the confidence I would have needed to do something myself.”
Instead — with the bird appearing weak but not in imminent danger — Daisey put off a rescue attempt until Tuesday morning and enlisted acquaintances at the Center for the Inland Bays to help her.
Daisey runs her business — Ecobay Kayaking Adventures — along the waters near James Farm and donates 20 percent of her profits to the preserve, which the CIB manages, and she knew they had at least some experience in dealing with the area’s avian residents.
“I called the CIB, because I knew they had had ospreys (that had been rescued),” Daisey said.
But when Daisey arrived at White Creek before 8 a.m. on Tuesday morning, things had taken a turn for the worse. “This poor lady, she’s out there with a pair of scissors, crying. Something like that can’t wait until first thing in the morning,” Daisey said sadly.
The heron was no longer on his feet and moving around on the shore of the pond, as he had been Monday afternoon. “When I got there, he moved his head a little bit,” Daisey noted. “But by the time E.J. (from CIB) got there, he was dead.”
“They’re such a proud, tall bird. It just kills me,” she added.
Upon hearing the news that the bird had died, regrets abounded that no one had stepped in in time to help, rather than wait for an expert to arrive.
“If I could have walked across that pond and gotten that bird myself…” Booth said, trailing off. “But if I’d done that, they’d have come after me,” he added, concerned about the consequences of interfering with the bird.
“I did everything I could to take care of it, and it wasn’t taken care of,” he continued with a note of bitterness. “A great blue heron is a magnificent bird. When you call the proper authorities and you make sure that everybody knows what’s going on, and nothing it done… It just really upsets me.”
“It’s a shame, because everybody wanted to help. There’s four parties I know of now who were involved,” Daisey said. “I think people need to know how to help them.”
Daisey said that when she’d called back to Tri-State on Tuesday afternoon, she’d received the information — if belatedly — that might have led her to try a rescue on Monday, before it was too late.
“She told me how to go about doing it, to take a big sheet and approach it from behind, with someone there to back you up,” Daisey related. “And that if it had swallowed (the netting) not to wrench it back up, but to take it up there (to Tri-State), where the bird could be X-rayed to see if it was tangled up in its internal organs.”
“In this case, he hadn’t swallowed it. It was just wrapped around his beak and throat,” Daisey noted, concluding that the bird had likely died of starvation, from just one too many days of being unable to eat.
Daisey also said she was concerned about how area developers were dealing with their stormwater retention ponds and drainage swales — particularly around the Inland Bays and its tributaries.
She wondered how many birds and other wildlife might be saved by a greater focus on keeping the ponds and swales clear of construction debris, such as the netting that killed the heron this week.
Resources scarce for area’s injured birds
Tri-State Volunteer Manager Julie Bartley was unable to confirm that more than one call had been received about the heron on Monday or that anyone there had suggested to any caller that help might be on the way. But she offered that the lack of response to the heron’s plight came simply down to a matter of resources.
Aside from a handful of paid staff, Tri-State relies entirely on volunteers to assist with injured and sick birds, and on mass calls such as an oil spill.
Currently, there is not a single trained Tri-State volunteer in Sussex County, she acknowledged.
“We try to get (DNREC) to handle it,” Bartley said of calls that come in from the state agency.
Some of Fish and Wildlife’s staff have received Tri-State’s training in the past, Bartley said, but she was unsure if any of those staffers still work for DNREC. And the state agency’s resources for bird rescue are likely as strapped as Tri-State’s, she surmised.
“It comes and it goes,” Bartley said of Tri-State’s volunteer availability. “Circumstances change,” she added, meaning that people who have been trained in the past often don’t remain available to help over the long haul.
“It’s a tough call when it’s an injured bird,” Bartley said of untrained citizens who might be considering intervening themselves in such a case. “They can also call the Kent County SCPCA,” she noted, but with the same degree of expectations as she had in a DNREC response.
“If they feel comfortable, they can catch the bird,” she advised. “We’ll explain what to do over the phone, if we can’t find a volunteer.”
Bartley said the preferred technique in catching an injured bird like the great blue heron that died this week is to approach the bird slowly, with a large sheet held behind the rescuer, where the bird can’t see it.
“Its instinct is to get away from you,” she said. “But if you use the sheet to cover its eyes and head, that enables you to stop it and keep it from trying to get away.”
Bartley reiterated cautions about trying to extract any material that a bird may have partially swallowed. “If it looks like it has swallowed a fishing hook, don’t pull it out,” she particularly cautioned.
Once the bird is captured, she said, “Put it in a box and then call us.” Tri-State can be reached for bird rescues at (302) 737-9543 between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. daily.
Many people are doing just that, potentially saving a bird’s life but also adding to the need for volunteers to help Tri-State care for such wildlife. Bartley said Tri-State had received 70 calls to help with injured or sick birds on Tuesday alone, with herself and two other staffers having trouble even keeping up with the phone calls.
And with training being a more intensive process than just a single brief session, Bartley said the time needed for staff to simply train new volunteers has also proven a problem. Though they are eager to have new volunteers, she said, there is no training date set right now, due to lack of staff time.
Once the next date is set, they’ll have at least two eager volunteers from Sussex County.
“I offered my help,” Daisey said. “Maybe myself and E.J. can be the bird rescuers of Sussex County.”
“But I was ignorant when I called yesterday,” she lamented, having left the body of the dead heron near where the bird died Tuesday morning. “We need to make sure we have people who know what to do. In this case, no one knew what to do over the course of a nearly a week.”
While help came too late for one great blue heron this week, Daisey is hoping that will change in the near future, when Sussex County might again have some options to help would-be bird rescuers, and the birds they want to save.
For more information on volunteering with Tri-State Bird Rescue & Research, call Volunteer Manager Julie Bartley at (302) 737-9543, ext. 102, e-mail her at volunteer@tristatebird.org or visit the group’s Web site at www.tristatebird.org.