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Kelly Sampson with Katrina victim. |
Bruin aids feathered flood victims
By Cynthia Lee
Today Staff Writer
In the panic to flee a drowning city, many in New Orleans had to leave their pets behind to face their own sad fate in the rising floodwaters.
In the ensuing race to rescue four-legged animals from starvation or drowning, a group of pet lovers mounted a small-scale, homegrown rescue effort that didn’t grab the attention of the national media.
They went to Louisiana to save abandoned pet birds.
Among them was Kelly Sampson, an administrative assistant in the School of Nursing and a bird lover since childhood. On Sept. 21, she flew to Baton Rouge as a volunteer to care for 200 abandoned birds being sheltered temporarily at the home of a local bird lover. Overwhelmed by her new flock, the Louisiana woman had posted a desperate plea for help on a listserv to which Sampson belonged.
“I didn’t have much money I could send her,” said the UCLA employee, who used her father’s frequent flier miles to get a ticket. “But I did have some vacation time, and I wanted to help. I thought what she was doing was very inspiring.”
While many abandoned birds drowned in their cages, others were rescued when their owners notified local animal shelters and left their home addresses before departing the city. Shelter volunteers tried to reach as many as they could in the flood zone. “But animal shelters are not equipped to care for birds,” Sampson said. So the shelters had to take them elsewhere.
For six days, Sampson worked alongside nine other volunteers, including veterinarians, at the woman’s home-turned-bird sanctuary. For three of those days, they were battered by torrential rain from Hurricane Rita. Sampson scrubbed cages, fed, watered and nursed birds and organized the massive amount of donated food, cages and supplies pouring in from the bird community.
At night she slept in a spare bedroom that also served as a sick bay for injured birds. She soothed the most distraught ones, who had gone days without food or water.“Birds are very social. In the wild, they are never alone. Most people may not realize that birds can get very nervous, feel lonely or even depressed,” she said.
Sampson knows firsthand about birds under stress. She rescued her own parrot, Ulrich, from a breeder who couldn’t sell the bird because he was deformed. Ulrich has a skeletal defect that prevents him from holding his head erect, so it dangles upside down. When she got Ulrich, his feathers bore the black streaks symptomatic of avian stress.
But after more than a year in Sampson’s care, Ulrich is fully feathered in brilliant green, streaked with deep blues and reds.
“Owning a bird is a lot of work. I don’t recommend it for most people,” she said. But once you bond with a bird, it becomes “more than just a pretty decoration.”
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