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A Week With ... Lisa Argilla at the Dunedin Wildlife Hospital
A Week WItH ...
lisa Argilla and the team at the Dunedin Wildlife Hospital
lIsA stuARt, BVsc (dist), pgCertsc.
I was privileged to be awarded the 2020 Dechra/CAV “A Week With …” opportunity and chose to spend my week with the amazing team at the Dunedin Wildlife Hospital. Since early in my career, I have been lucky enough to be involved in assessment, treatment and referral for rehabilitation of New Zealand native birds. Mostly, it has been kereru who are notorious for window strike injuries. Wanting to update my knowledge and learn from experts in this area was the reason I applied for this award. Founded by Dr Lisa Argilla, the Dunedin Wildlife Hospital opened its doors in January 2018 on the grounds of the otago Polytechnic, School of Veterinary Nursing. It is only able to exist through phenomenal fundraising efforts headed by Jordana Whyte, who manages the Wildlife Hospital trust, and local community support. the core team of Dr Lisa Argilla, veterinarian Dr Lizzie thomas, senior veterinary wildlife nurse Gina Martelli and veterinary technician Emily Brewer, were supported by volunteers, Department of Conservation rangers, Yellow-eyed Penguin trust rangers and Penguin Place conservation reserve volunteers during the time I spent with them. Planning my visit for 16–20 November 2021 meant I arrived right in the thick of hoiho (yellow eyed penguin) chick season. Intensive monitoring of wild nests by rangers allows early identification of chicks failing to thrive
Contact: lisas@vetsouth.co.nz The author taking the opportunity to get to know uri the kākāpō, a patient at the Dunedin Wildlife Hospital, who was recovering from cloacitis.
Photo courtesy of the author
and they are then brought to the Wildlife Hospital for assessment and treatment, with the goal being to return the chicks to their original nests. It was an eyeopening experience to see the level of detail and effort put into the chick monitoring. All chicks are weighed daily, their food is calculated based on body weight and percentage of weight gain/ loss calculated. Depending on their age, the daily number and quantity of feeds of fish slurry given via oesophageal tube are adjusted. In the 2020 season the team was also dealing with a number of chicks coming in with stomatitis lesions, on which information was being gathered for further research. Any chicks which died or were euthanised had a post-mortem examination and samples collected for this research.
At such a busy time of the year for the hospital, everyone mucks in to make sure the hoiho get the best outcomes possible – this means a lot of washing (they are definitely not litter box-trained), a lot of fish slurry to be made and a lot of drawing up the right feed volume for each chick. once in hospital, the chicks were identified by one or two nail polish colours on a wing, rather than by which nest they had come from, to make it easier to communicate about their progress. there were other patients during my time at the hospital however the Forest Bird ward was fairly quiet during my week-long visit. this was good news for all the kereru who didn’t fly into windows, just unfortunate for my best laid plans to see how the Wildlife Hospital made decisions for these cases. However, there were other cases to observe in the Forest Bird ward. these included Rotoroa the kea who was fairly opinionated when it came time to get his medicine, liked to personalise his cage but tolerated his daily time in the nebuliser quite well; uri the kākāpō who was nearing the end of his time at the hospital for treatment for cloacitis/vent dermatitis; and a northern giant petrel recovering from seizures. In addition, there was a continual stream of red billed gulls brought in, most harbouring enormous engorged ticks especially around the head and neck.
A lot of the learning I have taken away from the week at the hospital and used since then has related to small pieces of information and systems for doing things that I hadn’t previously thought of. the initial approach to all cases reiterated what we all know for all species – stabilise first! Don’t underestimate the need for pain relief, ensure a low stress environment (covering the cage, low voices, minimal handling) and fluid therapy (often oral) is important just as it is in mammalian patients. When it comes time for radiographs to check for orthopaedic injuries (which may be a day or more since admission), adding midazolam at 1.5–2mg/kg IM to the premedication is useful for kereru and can allow the butorphanol dose to be reduced from the 4 mg/kg used for pain relief initially to 2 mg/kg IM. to reduce the anaesthetic risk, the isoflurane rate was adjusted in a consistent manner with 0.5% incremental increases every 30 seconds until the desired anaesthetic depth is achieved; this snippet of information has worked very well for our nurse team once I returned to general practice. the hospital system was best summarised by ‘attention to detail’. All birds were weighed at the start of each day and given a check over. the food was weighed into the cages and the residual weighed prior to disposal. this allowed for quick identification of any problems or failure to respond to treatment as expected. tail feathers are carefully protected with plastic bags where needed to prevent feather damage and loss. With regards to medications, most drugs used on birds in New Zealand are off-label and the dose rates are either from the depths of textbooks or from the experienced brains of wildlife vets such as Lisa and Lizzie. In the case of kereru, butorphanol at 4 mg/kg I/M was used in hospital as the first line opioid pain relief. the addition of oral tramadol as another pain relief option at 30 mg/ kg per os twice daily seemed like a great option and I have since started using this in practice. using a 50 mg/ml suspension made from 50 mg tramadol capsules offers a very cost-effective option and seemed to work well. the meloxicam dose used for birds varies with each paper published, and I learnt that the dose is even higher in birds than I had been using. In the hospital, once hydrated and eating, the dose administered orally was up to 1–1.5 mg/kg twice daily if appropriate, with titration to the lowest effective dose after that. Antifungals were used more in the hospital setting than I have used in general practice. Voriconazole was the one most in use in the hospital for cases of suspected, or at risk of, aspergillosis. the experience of spending a week away from general practice and being immersed in a different type of hospital environment was invaluable. the team of Lisa, Lizzie, Gina, Jordana and Emily, along with all the volunteers I encountered were welcoming and made it an enjoyable time away. Having access to this facility for our southern native birds is a credit to the hard work put in by this team. thank you to the NZVA Companion Animal Veterinarians and Dechra for giving me this opportunity. l
this article was written as part of the requirements for receiving the Dechra/CAV "A week with ..." scholarship.
