PVC Pipes Can Make Great Legs

22.02.12

Lee Fox could just tell that Chrissy wanted to walk. There was a sense about her, a resolve that told Fox not to give up on her stately, four-foot-tall student. Like a mother waiting for her child to take her first steps, Fox anxiously held her breath. And on Christmas Eve—nearly a month after the bird’s arrival and the occasion that produced her name—Chrissy balanced precariously on her own leg and a prosthesis made from PVC pipe and a sink stopper, placing one in front of the other.

Chrissy is one of some 500,000 long-necked, long-legged gray sandhill cranes that annually migrate in flocks (“March Magic,” March-April 2010). A friend brought Fox, founder and executive director of the nonprofit rehab organization Save Our Seabirds (SOS), an injured Chrissy in Tampa five years ago, one of many birds suffering from a similar fate.

At that time in west central Florida, where SOS is located, the lanky-yet-graceful birds were losing legs at an alarming rate due to collisions with golf balls and cars. (It’s still happening today.) More than sixty percent of the hundred or so cranes that the organization was treating annually suffered accidents of this type. “They were being maimed. [They had] fractured legs, fractured wings,” Fox says. “We would bring them back to health only to have to put them down because there was no way they could stand.”

Source: Audubon Magazine