COLUMBIA \u2014 Jennifer Romesburg usually sticks to rehabilitating mammals, but she recently made an exception for an injured bird.<\/p>\n
On July 15, Fish the swan was found with an injury at Cosmo-Bethel Park in Columbia and taken to rehab. As of Sunday, it’s almost fully healed, and Fish is about ready to return back home.<\/p>\n
Many swan watchers called Romesburg, the founder of Jenny’s Wildlife Wonderland, concerned about a swan missing skin on its neck. They told her it was one of four young swans, or cygnets, in a family.<\/p>\n
“There’s so many people that have reached out to me and donated for his or her care and are really invested in these swans,” Romesburg said. “I had no idea they were this very popular waterfowl there.”<\/p>\n
Multiple people tried to rescue the injured bird, but with little success. That was until Seth Brown, who works with Jenny, got it in their car.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“I saw this guy and just went after him,” Brown said. “He went in the water a little bit, but he was pretty simple to catch.”<\/p>\n
While swans can be aggressive and even hiss at perceived threats, Fish was “chilling” on the ride back, Brown said.<\/p>\n
“He did a very good job during the ride,” Brown said.<\/p>\n
Fish is a younger swan, meaning it took months since the swan’s rescue for its adult white coloring to come in. Fish’s sex is currently unknown, as young swans typically look the same, male or female.<\/p>\n
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At first, to protect Fish’s open neck wound, Jenny and her crew used a fabric covering similar to a pet cone to prevent the bird from further irritating its skin. Fish has since grown out of it.<\/p>\n
The name “Fish” came from the swan’s surgeons as part of its rehab process.<\/p>\n
Fish underwent an operation in which a temporary skin graft from an Asian carp was attached to the wound to let the lower layer heal. The temporary name quickly stuck.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Jennifer Romesburg holds Fish’s head. She usually does this when it’s time for Fish to eat.<\/p>\n
Jenny expects Fish to be released back to Cosmo-Bethel Park in the next few weeks.<\/p>\n
“I do feel like if anything were to go wrong, I would be contacted immediately, and then maybe we’d have to go get him again or something like that,” Romesburg said. “Hopefully, he’ll just get healed, he’ll be fine and he’ll just live out his little best swan life.”<\/p>\n
Until then, Fish will continue recovering, waddling around and chirping at visitors and volunteers alike.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Fish takes a nap in its rehab facility.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"COLUMBIA \u2014 Jennifer Romesburg usually sticks to rehabilitating mammals, but she recently made an exception for an injured…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":847172,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[34985,5613,12110,79,201],"class_list":["post-847171","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-boone","tag-columbia","tag-midmissourinews","tag-science","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/847171","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=847171"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/847171\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/847172"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=847171"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=847171"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=847171"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}