An Egyptian goose that was seen wandering around the Anaheim Hills area for several days with an arrow shot clean through its neck died Wednesday after undergoing surgery at a veterinary clinic in Orange County.
The bird was first spotted last week and reported to Orange County Animal Care, which was not able to capture the animal. Every time officers got close to the bird, it managed to fly away.
Despite its gruesome injury, the goose appeared to be in good health, a county veterinarian had said Tuesday.
Ramon Salinas, an employee at a car wash on La Palma Avenue near the Santa Ana River, said he had been feeding the bird for more than a week.
That apparent built-up trust came in handy Wednesday, according to Gordon Outhier of SoCal Wood Ducks. After another unsuccessful attempt to capture him in the morning, the duck returned to the car wash, and Salinas was able to use a wire hook he had made to grab the goose’s leg, Outhier said.
Later in the day, animal care workers were trying to reduce stress on the animal so that it could undergo surgery, a spokeswoman for O.C. Animal Care said.
The biggest challenge will be getting dead tissue removed and making sure the wounds on each side are kept clean, said Dr. Kristi Krause of Serrano Animal & Bird Hospital in Lake Forest, where the bird was being treated.
The state of the bird’s tissue showed the arrow had been there at least several days and possibly a week, Krause said.
The goose underwent surgery early Wednesday evening, and the procedure was taking longer than expected because the skin had begun to heal around the wounds and adhere to the arrow, the Animal Care spokeswoman said.
The goose appeared to make it through surgery successfully but later died.
‘We are unsure if it was due to the extent of the injuries or some other complication,” said the Animal Care spokeswoman. “We were all hoping for a happy ending for this little guy.”
Egyptian geese are native to Africa; it was not clear how the one shot with an arrow had arrived in California.
