It has been quite chaotic around here lately. Let me see if I can catch us up.
J.D., our little buckling Fainting goat decided he was ready to date even though Thelma and Louise are underage. To avoid a teen pregnancy, we moved J.D. into the pasture with Jack and Diane. We supervised the first hour then came back into the house. Everything was fine. Everyone was getting along with everyone else. Then I looked out the window to see J.D. on the ground with Jack stomping him! We ran out and got J.D. to safety back into the pasture with the girls. He had a sore leg for a few days but escaped serious injury as evidenced by this video taken a few days after the run-in with Jack.
On to the next bit of mayhem. Michael was putting the roof on the goat/emu enclosures when he saw Stuart (emu) eat three big roofing screws with washers. I posted about the incident online and a vet friend told me he could be in serious trouble from zinc toxicity and/or perforation. We took Stuart to the vet today and here is his x-ray. You can see the three roofing screws, several wood screws, a rectangular piece of metal, and a bunch of rocks.
We are not sure what is going to happen but we are consulting with a specialist and she may come up and try to remove the hardware with an endoscope. For now all we can do is hope the metal pieces stay in the gullet where they are now, so they can be retrieved. We rented a big magnet on wheels and rolled it all around the barn collecting years of old screws, nails, washer, bolts, etc. Updates to come.
Lastly, I think the garbage truck scraped the ugly Italian cypress in front of our house this morning. Michael found these two baby blackbirds on the ground under the tree. This has happened once before. This time the local wild bird rescue people can’t take them so I have them for the night. I am meeting someone in the early a.m. who will take them to the Wildlife Rescue. In the meantime I am giving them water via a syringe and they are living in my garage. They are very noisy!
It’ s always something around here!
matt says
Hi I was wondering the outcome of your emu stewart, we have a 6 week emu that swallowed a roofing screw yesterday and was xrayed today.
Mary says
They were both absolutely fine. One had 30 screws inside! They were older though. They will eat anything and everything they can swallow so we learned to be more careful with hardware. Good luck.