Crash landings

Despite – or perhaps because of – their large size, swans seem particularly prone to injury. Known problems include collisions with cars, lead poisoning due to gunshot wounds or ingested foreign bodies and injuries from fishing hooks. Injuries to the birds' hips, however, are believed to be uncommon. Michaela Gumpenberger and Alexandra Scope of the University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna now present evidence to suggest that such injuries are more frequent than suspected but are under-recorded because of difficulties in diagnosis. They show that computerized tomography is far better suited to examine the hip joint than classical radiographic methods. Their results are published in the journal Avian Pathology.

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