Miracle Recovery For The Penguin Who Lost Her Waddle!
By Jill Dando News
Meet Flop – our Humboldt penguin with a very special story!
Life started as normal for Flop, who hatched back in April, under the watchful eyes of mum and dad. Sadly, after a few weeks, Flop’s mother passed away and dad started to leave the nest for long periods of time, forcing our bird team to step in and start rearing her alongside four other babies already in their care.
Flop continued to thrive for some weeks, but shortly after moving to our juvenile isolation area to continue her development, she developed a limp.
She was seen by the zoo’s vet that day and started on pain relief and anti-inflammatories, but within 24 hours she could no longer support her own weight and was rushed back to the vets, where blood tests revealed a reaction to an infection and she was given further medication.
Within a matter of days, her appetite was decreasing and she became withdrawn and her survival and any possible quality of life was looking bleak.
But our bird team were determined she wasn’t going to lose the fight and got their thinking caps on!
Penguins are generally gorge feeders, eating large amounts in small numbers of feeds. However, as Flop now couldn’t stand, all of her weight was on her front which made consuming and digesting large volumes of fish likely very uncomfortable for her.
Keepers began giving Flop lots of feeds with smaller quantities, which meant coming back to the zoo around 10pm each evening to give her the final feed of the day.
They also had to resort to force feeding her to ensure she completed her course of antibiotics and any weight loss was kept to a minimum.
In a bid to try and take the pressure off her internal organs, which would aid her digestion and get her standing upright, staff came up with the equivalent of a baby bouncer, which they handmade for her.
Every morning keepers placed Flop into the bouncer to be fed, allowing her feet to just touch the floor.
They hoped this would get her used to being upright and start to engage her feet and hips, leaving her in it for supervised periods of time, while they fed the rest of the hand-reared youngsters.
They also constructed a unique ‘treadmill’ and adapted a baby walker for her, and although they both allowed her to stand in an upright position, to begin with she wouldn’t try to walk – not even for the lure of a tasty fish!
Thankfully, it didn’t take too long for her to start to use her feet to try to push herself up. But she still couldn’t lift her head, instead lifting her hips to slide on her tummy across the floor.
In the meantime, keepers came across a similar case online at Toronto Zoo in Canada and reached out to them for advice and within 24 hours we received a reply with a host of useful information.
Slowly but surely, Flop started to gain weight and the team moved her back to the isolation area in Penguin Bay for small supervised periods so she could try and swim in the off-show pool.
This made a huge difference to her recovery and within days, she started to lift her head and stumble forward and eventually she began standing upright all by herself.
The team brought in an animal physiotherapist, giving the bird team a series of exercises they could do with Flop to gradually build her strength.
And just over a month later, Flop was able to spend her first whole day by herself in the isolation area with the other juveniles, where she currently remains before they all make a gradual return to the main colony.
She will always be smaller and lighter than the rest of our penguins, and the slight hunch in her back will probably never completely disappear.
