Homestead Dam animal freed at last
The bird was freed from fishing line around its leg
Mr and Mrs Joubert write:
As of last year, my wife and I (we work in Benoni) realised the pleasure of spending our lunch breaks at Homestead Dam.
Send your letters to bctletters@caxton.co.za
Feeding the birds and identifying the different species has become a pleasure.
Seeing the numerous injured Egyptian geese was not such a pleasure – many had fishing line tangled around their legs which cut into their legs.
On our lunch break on January 11, we spotted a bird that had great difficulty walking.
Here is a video of an Egyptian goose found on the internet
Upon closer inspection, we saw that this specific bird had a line wrapped around both legs that actually tied the legs together; the line had already tightened around the legs to such an extent that the feet had started to swell up.
Being animal lovers we could not sit around and watch this bird suffer like that, as it would surely not survive.
After numerous attempts to catch the bird – we have named it Houdini as it managed to escape and elude capture – we finally succeeded.
We managed to catch Houdini on our lunch break on January 17 and managed to remove all of the line from its legs.
Houdini seemed to be fine the next day when we checked on it as it is easy to identify with the scars left on the legs.
We implore all parkgoers and fishermen to please be more careful when discarding fishing line or rubbish.
Also read:
Fire department goes the extra mile in Northmead
My list of failed New Year’s resolutions
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