ROSEVILLE, Minn. — Nature walks are a summer staple for Leah Vanden Broecke and her kids, and they've seen enough herons around Lake Minnetonka's Halsted Bay, to know there was something off about the one they spotted last Friday.
"He was right in this little opening, trying to climb onto this tree and get himself up out of the water, but every time it tried to get up it was being pulled down into the water and that's when we saw fishing line." said Vanden Broecke, while standing on a fishing pier about twenty feet away from where she and her kids first spotted the heron. "It was really tough to watch because you could almost tell that the bird knew that he was just stuck and going to drown."
Roughly 45 minutes after putting out a call for help on a local Facebook page, a neighbor responded. Vanden Broecke captured video of the man wading into the water and carefully untangling the heron.
"The bird was so weak that it didn't put up any kind of a fight," she said. "You could see how much fishing line had been wound around his feet and his wings and it went up around his neck. We got him out of the water and even when we stood him up he toppled completely forward. He couldn't even stand on his two feet."
A Word of Caution
Dr. Agnes Hutchinson, senior veterinarian for the Wildlife Rehabilitation Center in Roseville, watched footage of the heron rescue, and while she was relieved to see it freed, she also wants to pass along a word of caution.
"I understand the wish and the need to help," Dr. Hutchinson said. "But we take very special precaution when we treat these animals because they can be quite highly stressed and feisty. Please, never approach a heron or a loon without goggles or protective eyewear because they can really injure you."
Having said that, after years of work treating animals caught up in fishing line or by fishing hooks and other tackle, Dr. Hutchinson says the odds are much greater that anglers pose a much bigger injury threat to them.
"We do see these cases like this quite commonly," she said. "We have treated geese and herons and also songbirds."
Loon Ingests Multiple Fish Hooks
Around the time of the heron rescue, the Wildlife Rehabilitation Center took in a loon that had been found in distress - with fishing line hanging out of its beak - in northern Minnesota.
Dr. Hutchinson: "When we got the call, they already knew the loon had ingested multiple hooks. Once we sedated him, we located two fish hooks in the esophagus. We could also see parts of fish hooks further down, in the actual stomach."
Kent Erdahl: "How common is it to see not one fish hook but multiple fish hooks."
Dr. Hutchinson: "Yeah, this is really interesting with this case, the first hook is attached to the second hook, they were connected with a line. I haven't seen that before."
Somehow, the medical team was still able to successfully fish the hooks out through the loon's esophagus, but even though it made it through surgery the bird was never able to fully recover.
"Full anesthesia and this procedure on a patient that's already emaciated is very hard," she said. "And, unfortunately, about a day... 24 hours later, he died in our care."
A Message for Anglers
Both Vanden Broecke and Dr. Hutchinson say they understand that fish hooks and severed lines can sometimes be unavoidable while fishing, but they wanted to speak up in hopes of preventing avoidable injuries to wildlife.
"Everybody likes to fish, we love that doing that, but we are sharing our environment with these wild animals and I think we need to do a better job of taking care of our wildlife," Dr. Hutchinson said.
The Wildlife Rehabilitation Center asks anglers to take steps like removing hooks before you release fish, working to retrieve line that gets tangled instead of cutting it and using a net to land fish to lessen the likelihood of a line breaking.
"I think it's just good for people to be more aware," Vanden Broecke said.
Fortunately, the awareness prompted by her Heron rescue has a happy ending.
"We left him out on the deck overnight, hoping he would dry off," Vanden Broecke said. "The next morning he was fully dry, his feathers were back to normal and he was walking around in the backyard. He ended up just flying away and he was completely back to normal. It was amazing."
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