Inside what’s believed to be world’s busiest wildlife vet clinic, Currumbin Wildlife Hospital, Gold Coast
Every day staff at the world’s busiest wildlife hospital on the Gold Coast treat more than 30 injured animals, from deadly diseases to broken bones. And it’s right here on our doorstep. This is what it’s like on the inside.
Pets & wildlife
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THE ‘PIE-IN-THE-SKY’ DREAM
IT’S a ‘pie-in-the-sky’ dream, but one day Currumbin Wildlife Hospital’s most senior vet hopes its busy clinic will become a referral centre.
It’s not because he doesn’t like his job — far from it.
He just hopes that most vets will one day have the skills and tools necessary to look after sick and injured native animals locally.
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Dr Michael Pyne, who has been at the vet clinic for two decades, says most vet clinics will focus just on domesticated animals like cats and dogs, with fewer able to take in an injured or sick native animal.
“We do a seven-month internship for vets,” Dr Pyne says.
“We also have two or three nurses (learning) here every day.
“They learn all about wildlife, then go back to their domestic animal practice, but they know all about wildlife.
“We’re really big on that whole concept of getting all our information out to everyone. We want to share it as best we can. My dream would be to see us as a referral hospital where the standard wildlife cases are dealt with by standard vet clinics and anything tricky or special would be sent to us.”
A DAY IN THE LIFE OF
Days at the hospital begin at 8am, starting with a brief five-minute meeting to get everyone up to speed.
Nurses then spend the morning checking patients, giving out medication and feeding them.
Native animals are notoriously hard to feed, Dr Pyne says.
The animals need fresh fruit and vegetables — second-hand foodstuffs will not be eaten.
Koalas of course only eat a handful of the hundreds of eucalypt trees available and fresh branches from plantations have to be gathered.
Mid morning is when surgeries begin, to give the animals time for supervised recovery.
After that, it’s anyone’s guess as to what will walk through the door needing their help.
“It’s really like an accident and emergency hospital,” Dr Pyne says.
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“These animals coming in are in a pretty bad way, they don’t just come in with a sore toe. You plan your day at the start, but it rarely goes according to that …”
The hospital also receives patients through their volunteer manned ambulance, which picks up sick and injured wildlife from other vet surgeries.
It’s busy, and staff believe it to be the busiest wildlife hospital in the world.
The hospital closes at 5pm each day, but Dr Pyne says it would be great to extend their hours to 12 hours a day to match up with dusk, when animals might get hit by cars.
THE MATHS
When it comes down to it, it’s all about the maths. From the number of animals they get through to the costs of running the hospital, costs of which are staggering.
Generally, it will cost more than $6000 a day just to open the hospital. That’s because there is at least one koala coming in every day and there is an 80 per cent chance they will need to be treated for chlamydia.
Then there’s still another 29 animals that need to be treated that same day. Most other natives will cost a fraction of a koala — thankfully — about $100 a day.
But that’s still another $2900.
Then there’s the staff wages. Three vets are usually on each day, with five or six nurses rostered on as well.
Thankfully, the hospital is rarely short of volunteers, with 120 regulars lined up at any one time. Fifteen of them will complete their shift at the hospital each day.
A handful of vet techs and nurses in training are also there to help out, in return for some hands-on experience.
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While some of the equipment has been bought, much of it has been generously donated, including a machine the size of your palm worth $20,000. It may be small in size, but it’s key to saving koalas from deadly chlamydia.
Of course, drugs, supplies and medication also need to be purchased.
Finally, there are the donations. And they’re priceless really because while the government pitches in about 20 per cent of the yearly running costs, the remaining 80 per cent is picked up and generously donated by the community.
That is, you.
Unfortunately, with an extra 1000 animals coming in through the surgery every year, these costs will only rise.
THE PATIENTS
While the maths are important to the hospital’s survival, it is the patients that really tell the story of the work the clinic does.
Take Nike the snake for example, found with more than 500 ticks in a backyard pool this year.
The hospital removed 511 ticks from the python, which was left with anaemia.
He was treated for another infection before being placed into care with the Tweed Valley Wildlife Carers. He was released this week.
The hospital also regularly takes on abandoned baby birds and will place them with a carer until they’re strong enough and old enough to be released again.
They even helped out when Wildcare rescued a koala stuck on a metal pole in the middle of a busy Gold Coast intersection late last year.
‘Jack’ the koala was checked over to ensure he was okay and later released into a safer location.
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Dr Pyne says while they get about 1600 lorikeets through a year, some of their patients are quite uncommon, including lace monitors, peregrine falcons, thorny devils, pacific baza and even a southern hairy-nosed wombat.
But Dr Pyne says one of his favourite memories was when they managed to save a koala joey after it had been attacked by a dog.
The six-month-old joey had been left with collapsed and punctured lungs, before travelling to the hospital from an area five hours away.
“The koala should never have lived (after the attack),” he said.
“We did the surgery and he made a full recovery.”
KOALA CRISIS
There’s a reason why our koalas are costing the surgery a small fortune and it’s called chlamydia.
Twenty years ago just two or three koalas would arrive at the doorstep of the clinic per year.
Ten years ago the clinic were seeing about 28 koalas a year.
Now the clinic sees to about 480 koalas — and there will only be more. “We’ve seen an almost 20 fold increase to 481 in ten years, it’s a big, big jump,” Dr Pyne said.
He said the deadly disease was responsible for the huge spike in numbers.
And it was wreaking havoc upon the southeast Queensland koalas, causing irreparable damage to livers and kidneys if caught too late.
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“If we can control chlamydia, we can keep koalas on the Coast,” Dr Pyne said.
“If we can’t control chlamydia, we’re not going to have them here in the future. It’s such a big problem. We have to find a way of managing it.”
Luckily the wildlife hospital is the best spot in Australia to wind up for a sick koala with chlamydia.
The in-house lab at the hospital has nearly everything staff could need to diagnose and treat their sick charges.
All koalas coming through the hospital are tested on a state-of-the-art machine called a VetScan that checks their DNA for diseases, even telling vets the levels of chlamydia it might be carrying.
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“It’s very likely that we’re the only vet clinic in the world that has one of these,” Dr Pyne says.
“This little machine allows us to catch it incredibly early.
“If they’re not showing any signs we can actually pick it up here, start treatment and eliminate it.”
It takes just 20 minutes for vets to know whether or not a koala will need treatment after their DNA is swabbed.
This means better outcomes for koalas suffering from the deadly disease.
OPEN DAY
Currumbin Wildlife Hospital’s Open Day is a rare opportunity to really go behind the scenes and see what the vets do.
Expect it to be busy, with about 30 animals coming through needing to be looked at.
It could be any animal — a lorikeet, a pelican, an echidna, a turtle.
Unfortunately, it’s almost guaranteed a koala will find itself at the hospital.
“I think it’s important for people to understand we get busier every year,” Dr Pyne says.
“This is a real opportunity to see the hospital and contribute.”
Visitors will have the opportunity to ask questions of hospital staff and to see vets working in real time on their patients.
Tickets cost $20 for an adult, $10 for a child for 2pm to 5pm entry to the sanctuary and hospital on February 23. All money raised will go back to the hospital.
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