{"id":494114,"date":"2026-03-25T08:19:08","date_gmt":"2026-03-25T08:19:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/494114\/"},"modified":"2026-03-25T08:19:08","modified_gmt":"2026-03-25T08:19:08","slug":"swans-suffering-as-river-crouchs-bank-is-like-broken-glass","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/494114\/","title":{"rendered":"Swans suffering as River Crouch&#8217;s bank is like &#8216;broken glass&#8217;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Swans are suffering from infections caused by concrete riverbanks that feel like &#8220;broken glass&#8221;, according to a wildlife hospital.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Things have got worse at the River Crouch in Hullbridge in recent months, according to South Essex Wildlife Hospital, which has seen &#8220;six or seven&#8221; cases of bumblefoot.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">The bacterial infection breaks the skin on the bottom of birds&#8217; feet via bits of grit, causing them to become very inflamed.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Sue Schwar, the hospital&#8217;s founder, said: &#8220;Unfortunately, water birds have very soft feet. They&#8217;re not really designed to be kept on concrete&#8230; it&#8217;s like us walking over broken glass. It&#8217;s really painful for them.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Swans are suffering from infections caused by concrete riverbanks that feel like &#8220;broken glass&#8221;, according to a wildlife&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":494115,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[90,56,54,55,4407],"class_list":["post-494114","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-science","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/494114","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=494114"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/494114\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/494115"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=494114"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=494114"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=494114"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}