Do you have a flatbed scanner? If so, you probably already know what I found out by accident—that the scanner is an excellent camera for close-ups. I'm only a mediocre photographer at best, too impatient to bother to learn about f-stops and so on, so my efforts with floodlight, natural light, or flash have been a matter of luck. And the digital camera I have isn't any use for close close-ups.

First I tried leaving the scanner lid open for objects with depth, balancing the lid on small props at the corners. But then I discovered it could be lifted off entirely, and to reflect the light from below I experimented covering the object with sheets of coloured paper. Then I tried upside-down bowls and boxes, some of which produced attractive blue-gray backgrounds. As the object gets photographed on its underside, a few bits of scotch tape or a tiny dab of stickum helped keep it upside-down if required, e.g., photographing the top of a bird skull. Here are a few of my results.

The overlapping bony plates (sclerotic rings) of the orbital tubes are folded underneath (behind) the eyeball in a manner resembling pleats in stiff material being tucked under something. This forms a pleated covering on sides and around the back of the elongated eyeball of owls. Amazing to see.

Case # 6676. October. Found in house under construction, taken to a vet clinic; they sent it to us 24 hours later. Vet history: owl fine, maybe thin, can fly, perch, eyes ok, etc.

When I opened box owl leaped to attack me, v spirited. I picked her up using the standard small-bird grip (first two fingers holding the neck, thumb and last two fingers gently curling to support body; because there is a slender space between closed fingers the neck cannot be damaged) looked at her ears, which were both severely bruised-- there was a large amount of blood behind the skin-- have never seen both ears like that. Scalp was also purple under feathers. Eyes fine. As I transferred her to the other hand to apply DMSO (to reduce pain and swelling) to bruised scalp, her head fell sideways, dead. This too has never happened before. Volunteer driver shocked--me too.

PM= immature owl. Large haemorrhage with big clots and free blood on R side of neck, all the way up and over the entire scalp and behind both ears. Skull when exposed and washed showed no injury. Brain when shelled out showed no bleeding; it weighed 4 g. Internally owl was perfect, ovary obvious with white follicles clear, no injury anywhere.

The vet clinic notes said i.v. bolus of 1.5cc given into the R* jugular 8:15 am today. This may have caused the haemorrhage and clots, and I may have loosened a major clot when I used the finger-grip, and when I released it the clot may have been pumped into the heart. That seems a possible explanation. The haemorrhage may also have been present before capture.

A bruised ear nearly always is accompanied by a damaged eye, but not in this case. Also, blood on the skull under the scalp is new to me, for though blood is often seen through the thin scalp, it is in the skull. I halved the skull lengthwise to show the thickness of the styrofoam-like skull--8mm near the front, 4mm at the thinnest near the back, all easily marked by a fingernail.

Note. My opinion, our practice: no "emergency" injections are given. Fluid needs in birds are quite different from mammals and handling stress almost certainly raises blood-pressure. Immediate rest allows clots to form when haemorrhage is suspected. See "Why Tube-Feed?" column. Incidentally, as soon as I found that the owl could fly I would have (and was going to) let it go promptly.

* I phoned and asked which side

Woodpeckers have such long probing tongues that they have to have somewhere to store them when not "out at work" deep in a woody crevice after grubs, searching under bark for insects, eggs and larvae, or licking up ants in a lawn. Though the tongue-bones all start under the beak and then curve up the back of the skull and cross the top; but the tips are stored differently according to species.

I found that the Yellow-shafted Flicker stores its tongue-tips up the right nostril. A young Yellow-bellied Sapsucker had short bones that only extended to the level of its ears. I remember another species whose tips split and circled each eye (can't find it in database). The Hairy Woodpecker coils its tips around its right eye. Here is a case comment about an adult male Hairy with brain damage:

Head tucked tightly up, tongue fully extended. Severe torticollis. Unable to stand but can cling, barely. No change next am so euthanasia.

PM= crack in skull just behind L eye. See diagram in logbook of tongue bone tracks and how the muscle pulls back from the R eye as the tongue extends, causing the muscle/bone to contract up. The tract in which the bones/muscles slide is transparent. Possibly when skull edema is created, the tract is compressed, preventing the return of the deep pink fleshy muscle to its position around the R eye (both ends rest there.)

Humming-bird had its tongue-bones over the skull to the level of its eyes, and the tip of the tonue was forked.

With fatal head injuries, the tongue is locked out in the fully extended position.

Case # 1588. One of the most baffling cases of brain damage we ever had was a little Broadwinged Hawk, the smallest relative of the Redtails and Roughlegs. Her balance was badly affected, causing her to lean heavily back on her tail, and whenever she became alarmed by my approach she would be seized by a violent fit that would cause her to fling about the ground clockwise. The rest of her time she simply stood on the floor in a kittenish pose with her head cocked, unable even to mount a stump or perch for the basic comfort that all healthy raptors enjoy. The head tilt was characteristic of partial blindness, and indeed she had no vision in the left eye and very little in the right, though the pupils reacted normally and the eyes appeared outwardly undamaged.

These symptoms were bad enough, but soon there proved to be one far worse. The small hawk showed no response of any kind to food: not to a stillhot mouse offered to her beak or placed on her foot, not to fresh bloody mouse liver placed in her mouth, not to a live mouse in her sight, not to another hawk noisily crunching next door (and she was not deaf). That was our entire repertoire of appetitestimuli (we don't tube-feed) and so she had to be lifted out every day to have chopped mice tucked over the swallow reflex at the back of her tongue.

Throughout the first eight weeks, she exhibited this deeply entrenched amnesia for everything to do with appetite, recognition of food, and the act of eating. I thought of her when I read the absorbing book, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, by American neurologist Dr. Oliver Sacks, when he spoke of a neurologically blind patient. "He was bewildered when I used words such as `seeing'. He had lost all visual images and memories totally... his entire lifetime of seeing, of visuality, had in effect, been stolen... he had become, in essence, a nonvisual being." * The hawk had apparently become a nonnourishable being in the same way; her lifetime of eating had too been stolen, till one day when her damaged memory function was stimulated in a most unexpected manner.

Robin and I had just finished pushing down the daily meal—the fiftysixth—and we were less careful than usual and overfilled her crop. As soon as she was put back in her cage, she threw up the whole lot of whitefurred mouse chunks on the dark green astroturf floor. Peering down with great intensity at the scattered scraps at her feet, she made a profound and miraculous coupling in her disordered brain at last, and hesitantly, she began to pick them up and swallow them down again!

Thereafter she managed to recognize and to clumsily eat chopped white mice on a dark background,** but continued to show greatly limited vision and amnesic loss of early learning. She was also troubled by poor motor skills, fumbling and dropping bits often, and when offered a whole mouse, she would spend long periods beaking it this way and that with no idea how to go about tearing it up. There seemed to be a faint and flickering stimulus to "do something" hawks do with mice. Nevertheless she managed just well enough to be put outside in a small aviary, even learning to climb up on a low perch, but unfortunately that was the extent of her progress after three months, so we `put her to sleep.'

On postmortem her brain was a bizarre sight. The entire left half of the cerebrum was non-existent, lysed away by infection introduced through a depressed fracture on the same side of the skull. With it was gone the area behind the eye; this area pertains to feeding. The hawk must have been almost totally blind, for the visual pathways cross over in the brain of birds as in man, making it unable to transmit much to the good eye due to progressive loss of the left cerebrum. Ironically, though the right brain was probably able to transmit for leftsided vision, the retina of the left eye had been destroyed.

(story from The Avian Ark)

* I wrote about this form of head injury in Volume 1 of Beaks, Brains and Bones, and termed it NUF, for No Understanding of Food.

** new studies have found that some damaged neurons in the brain do re grow or are replaced, and make new connections. Excellent books about it include Phantoms in the Brain, by V.S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakelee, and Mapping the Mind, by Rita Carter.

As one of the points that Kit is demonstrating is the quality of the images, you may be able to use your browser's capability to have a more detailed view of each image by right clicking on the image and choosing to View Image in the resultant menu if that choice is available.

In SOME cases, depending on what browser you are using and what screen resolution you have set, the image may actually appear to deteriorate.

If you have questions about manipulating the images, send me a question in an e-mail message using the address below.