Vet’s life work has been for the birds
Kitsilano veterinarian honoured with her profession’s 2017 Humane Award
Vets might fly, renowned veterinarian and author James Herriot wrote. But in Dr. Anne McDonald’s case, it’s her veterinary work that allows many birds to fly again.
McDonald gained a measure of fame for treating Canuck the Crow, nursing him back to health after he’d been attacked by a soccer dad.
But Canuck is just one of the 3,000 birds she treats every year at her Night Owl Bird Hospital in Kitsilano.
“Canuck was one of the best things that ever happened for Night Owl as far as publicity,” she said. “It brought in a whole new bunch of nice people.”
McDonald, recently honoured by the Canadian Veterinary Medical Association with its 2017 Humane Award, knew from the time she was a animal-loving girl growing up in Vancouver that she would become a vet. “There was no question that’s what I’d be,” she said.
The first family pet she recalls was a stray cat. “But I loved birds, I just did,” she said at her clinic.
By the age of 15, McDonald was working in a vet’s clinic. After high school, she took UBC’s pre-veterinary program, earning a B.Sc. in agriculture, and then a veterinarian’s degree in Saskatchewan followed by a three-year residency in Texas.
“I remember there was this nice man standing in the hallway, in charge of birds and exotics, and there was a budgie flying down the hallway. I just thought to myself, ‘Boy, it would be really nice to work with birds.’ ”
From there, she performed surgery and worked at the Vancouver Animal Emergency Clinic. Since 1990, she has owned the Night Owl Bird Hospital, now in the alley off West Broadway between Cypress and Maple streets.
It is the only animal clinic in Canada devoted solely to the treatment of birds, she said.
Statistics show, McDonald said, that far fewer bird owners take their pets to see a vet than dog or cat owners. Most pet birds live in cages. Because of that, because they’re protected behind bars, a lot of bird owners might take for granted that fresh food, clean water and regularly changing the newspaper at the bottom of the cage are all the care a bird needs. Not so.
Beaks and nails need to be filed and trimmed periodically, wings groomed and clipped. Then there are what McDonald calls captivity diseases: Liver disease, heart disease, vascular disease, respiratory disease. “They become like us,” she said. “The problems we have, they have. And birds have very sensitive respiratory systems. … As a generality, birds are 10 times more sensitive to air quality than people are.”
“Just general hygiene, when I first started out, was given no heed,” said McDonald, who at age 65 is considering retirement. “Today, the cages that come in are much better, but hygiene is still a big thing.
“When people get a pet bird, it’s a good idea to come in and talk about general husbandry.”
When we began the interview first thing in the morning, the parking lot at the clinic was empty. When the interview ended 45 minutes later, it was full, the latest patient to arrive being Phil the finch, a Richmond rescue who, is getting on in finch years. McDonald looks weary.
But she said she feels far better than she did half a year ago, at the height of a gargantuan rescue effort on Vancouver Island, in which 584 birds in various stages of stress or illness that had been neglected were brought to her for care.
“The focus has changed,” she said of the 160 birds that she and her associate, Dr. Nadine Meyer, are still caring for that need homes among those rescued from a sanctuary in Coombs that had fallen on hard times.”
McDonald has spent a lot of her own money rescuing and caring for the African greys, lovebirds, cockatoos, budgies and macaws from the Island, but you get the feeling she’ll keep working for as long as she can, until the last bird is looked after. Is it worth it?
“Oh, it has to be, it just has to be. We just have to get through the rest of it. It will probably take us at least another year to find homes for them all.”