A whitethroat is undergoing a whitethroat foot casts recovery programme at Leicestershire Wildlife Hospital after being struck by a car and found stunned in the road by members of the public. Staff fashioned the casts from cardboard, cotton wool, and micropore tape, a low-tech solution that appears to be working.
The bird was discovered lying in the road following a collision last Saturday. The people who found it called the hospital, which then took the bird in. According to the BBC, the hospital is based in Kibworth Beauchamp, Leicestershire.
On arrival, staff found that the bird’s feet had curled up and were unable to grip, the result of nerve or ligament damage sustained in the collision. The rest of the bird was uninjured. The challenge was keeping the feet in a functional position while the tissue healed, without specialist avian orthopaedic equipment to hand.
How the Cardboard Casts Work
‘He was found last Saturday by some people who then called us and brought him in. We have used this technique before with other baby birds, but it’s usually when they have nutritional deficiencies,’ said Amy Blower at the hospital. The approach adapted a method the team had used previously, applying it here to trauma-related damage rather than a dietary cause.
The construction is straightforward by design. ‘We put a little bit of cotton wool between the feet and the cardboard to add a bit of cushioning and then use micropore tape to secure them,’ Blower said. The cotton wool provides padding against the hard surface, and the tape holds everything in place without restricting circulation. The casts keep the feet flat and stable, allowing the bird to bear weight and stand normally while healing progresses.
The results have been encouraging. ‘It seems to be doing the trick and he is making a good recovery,’ Blower said. Staff expect to release the bird within a few days, once they are satisfied the feet have healed sufficiently for him to survive in the wild.
A Whitethroat Foot Casts Case That Reflects a Broader Conservation Picture
The whitethroat is not a common patient at this type of facility. ‘It’s unusual for us to get whitethroats as they are only around in the summer and migrate from Africa,’ Blower noted. The species is a seasonal visitor to the UK, present during the warmer months before returning south.
That seasonal status matters in conservation terms. The whitethroat is listed as an amber species of conservation concern in the UK by the RSPB, meaning it requires monitoring and potential intervention, though not the emergency-level action reserved for red-listed species. Road collisions represent one of the quieter pressures on bird populations, rarely dramatic enough to draw attention, but real in their cumulative effect on species that are already being tracked for decline.
The hospital’s willingness to improvise with materials already to hand made the difference here. There is no commercially produced foot cast for a bird this small, and the window for intervention was short. A bird with damaged feet cannot perch, forage, or escape predators, without the casts, the prognosis would have been poor regardless of the absence of other injuries.
The Leicestershire Wildlife Hospital expects to release the whitethroat back into the wild in the coming days, completing what turned out to be a recovery built largely from stationery supplies.
