As regular CFZ-watchers will know, for some time Corinna has been doing a column for Animals & Men and a regular segment on On The Track... particularly about out-of-place birds and rare vagrants. There seem to be more and more bird stories from all over the world hitting the news these days so, to make room for them all - and to give them all equal and worthy coverage - she has set up this new blog to cover all things feathery and Fortean.

Wednesday 28 November 2012

Swans Have Crash Landings and Hip Injuries Are More Common Than Previously Thought


ScienceDaily (Nov. 26, 2012) — Despite -- or perhaps because of -- their large size, swans seem particularly prone to injury. Known problems include collisions with cars, lead poisoning due to gunshot wounds or ingested foreign bodies and injuries from fishing hooks. Injuries to the birds' hips, however, are believed to be uncommon. Michaela Gumpenberger and Alexandra Scope of the University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna now present evidence to suggest that such injuries are more frequent than suspected but are under-recorded because of difficulties in diagnosis. They show that computerized tomography is far better suited to examine the hip joint than classical radiographic methods.

Their results are published in the journal Avian Pathology.

Diagnosing an injury in a swan is a far from easy undertaking. Not only are swans large, frequently weighing over 10 kg, but they are generally not happy at being handled and thus many of them can only be examined after sedation, which naturally represents a risk. The hip joints of many species of bird are known to be vulnerable to injury but swans are believed to suffer broken hips only rarely. The traditional way of examining the birds' hips relies on radiography but Gumpenberger and Scope now show that computerized tomography (CT) gives more reliable findings.


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