When the Harris' Hawk came in with a broken leg we knew it wasn't good news. Birds always pose an anesthetic risk as it is, but repairing their bones so they can hunt again is even more of a challenge. Anyone that has worked their way through a chicken roast knows that a lot of bird bones are hollow and thin. With the leg of this bird broken in the middle we had no choice but to attempt surgically repair it.
After giving a combination of propofol anesthetic and valium intravenously the hawk slipped into a slumber and we put a tube down his windpipe to maintain him on anesthetic gas. The feathers on the leg had to be plucked and the area was surgically repaired.
After making an incision and finding the bone and the break I took a sterile wrapped electric drill and carefully began drilling holes in the bones. The trick was to not put too much pressure on the bone or it might shatter and yet have holes large enough to put metal surgical pins through. Once the pins were in place the broken ends of the bone were lined up.
A sterile surgical wire was wrapped around the broken end to help hold it together and the initial skn incision was closed. With everything line up, the next step would be to stop the bone from rotating on itself and to keep it together as the bird walked on it. I needed to line up the pins stuck through the bird's leg and put some additional external support along them.
After mixing up 5 minute epoxy glue we quickly put into a syringe and injected it into tubing poked onto the pins. As the glue hardened it made a solid splint on the each side of the leg that would prevent rotation and yet allow the leg the heal straight!
