I live in Hawaii, about 2 blocks from the beach on the windward side of Oahu. Today we left our garage door open, and tonight we found a disoriented sea bird waddling around inside the garage. He seemed to be sick because he didn't fly away when we approached. We wrapped him in a towel and took him to the local vet, who has nighttime hours for emergency walk ins. She identified him as a shearwater. She said sometimes shearwaters get dehydrated and end up on driveways and yards. We live about two blocks from 2 islands called "the Mokes", which are a nesting site for shearwaters. I guess the little guy was trying to fly there, but he got dehydrated and pooped out. Our garage looked like the nearest shelter.
The vet determined that no wings were broken and he was just dehydrated. She placed a feeding tube in his stomach and gave him a 60 cc bolus of water and glucose. She asked us to take him to Sea Life Park, where they have a Sea Bird Recovery Center. She said that even though it was night and the park was closed, there would be a security guard who could guide us to the Rescue Center where we could drop off the bird.
So we drove 8 miles to Sea Life Park. When we drove up, a security guard came up to our car. We told him we had a sick sea bird, and he acted like he always received deliveries of sick birds at 9:30pm. He gave us directions to the back of the parking lot where there were a lot of bird crates, stacked on a rack. There was a stack of forms, asking us to write what city we found him in and what time he was found. We noticed that there were already birds in two other crates. A busy night for sick birds. The sea bird specialist will examine all of the birds in the morning and determine if they need further first aid or if they can be released. Such a valuable service for sick sea birds and I never knew it existed.
We put the bird in a nice crate and said "nighty night" and goodbye.
If some nice Kossack will give me easy to understand directions on how to upload photos from my iPhone onto this diary, I will try to post some photos. I have tried to use Photobucket and Flickr but I can't seem to figure out how to make the photos appear in the diary. I am going to go to bed right now, since it is 2:12am HST. I will check back in about 6 hours.