I'm covered in dirt and I've scraped my knee.

I feel like I'm 10 again.

Remember that feeling of a scraped knee? It doesn't hurt all that badly, but it's relentless?

It's all for a good cause though. This time my clumsiness had nothing to do with it.

As some of you may know we have a flock of geese that call our lab grounds home. It's a good home for them, we have large lawns that no one uses except the woodchucks and raccoons and we have our own tidal salt water pond for paddling around and someone always makes certain that they have fresh cool water to drink (even if it gets me consistant death threats from coworkers who are tired of the poops).

This is the first year in a while that we haven't had goslings which I found a little worrying but we did have baby raccoons so at least someone around here is doing their part.

Anyway, last week we noticed one of the geese was holding her leg up all funny. I watched for a bit and while it seemed broken from the angle she was getting around just fine so rather than stress her out with a chase I let her try to heal naturally.

Today I came to work and one of the Doc's said we should call animal control because the goose had fishing line around her leg.

Sure enough, today I could get close enough to see and there was the line.

Animal control HATES geese.

I rallied my students, and the doc and together they held the goose steady and kept her as calm as possible as I used forcepts and some dissecting shears to free the line from her leg. It was pretty deep in there and at first I wasn't sure I'd be able to get in but I was. It took lots of crawling around on the ground and skinning my knees on some rocks though.

The leg is still warm so there's some circulation and there was no bleeding but we slathered it in antibiotic cream just in case. Now she's resting in the shade with a puddle of fresh water close enough to drink from. This is her now standing on the foot we pulled the line from, resting the one that's done all the work lately

Keep a good thought for her.

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