I'd take her to a vet. Meanwhile, guard against shock, which can kill. Keep her warm and quiet, keep up with the antibiotic ointment, Pedialyte and applesauce. You need to keep her hydrated and some food energy in her until she is eating and drinking on her own. Live mealworms are a treat for chickens if you can get her to eat them, they are also a great source of protein which her body will need lots of to heal. Baby food is good also--the stuff for youngest babies with no chunks--get one meat and one green and one orange vegetable, mix them together with a bit of baby cereal--the stuff at the grocery store, it looks like a flaky powder. Get it warm (at least her body temp) and handfeed her with it, using what is called an 'irrigation syringe' you can get from any pharmacy (it's a plastic syringe with no needle, no prescription needed). Birds will eat warm food more readily than cold or room temp, and their body won't have to expend energy warming it up. Every little bit helps. Are you sure it wasn't a raccoon? It sounds like classic raccoon attack injury to me--the back eaten out, basically. Keep an eye out for raccoons in case he comes back and brings friends, protect your other birds. If she recovers, but the wound needs help healing, see this great article on cell migration: http://www.shagbarkbantams.com/cell.htm Good for you for giving her a chance and helping out, hope she makes it! Velvet ~:>

Bird baths help birds stop pecking tomatoes just for water, but even with a water source handy, mocking birds actually eat my tomatoes until sometimes I'm left with just an empty tomato skin hanging on the vine with all the insides eaten out. Here's my solution for birds pecking tomatoes: I use a homemade rabbit trap to trap the tomato eating birds and release them elsewhere. The trap is better than shooting birds because you only trap the birds that actually peck your tomatoes and don't remove innocent birds. My trap is a typical homemade, wire cage rabbit trap with a sliding door on one end connected to a trip stick in the center of the trap. When the rabbit enters the trap, he hits the stick and releases the door and traps himself. To catch birds instead of rabbits, I tie a piece of red tomato to the lower end of the trip stick. When the bird comes in and pulls on the tomato piece to eat it, he trips the stick and you have a trapped bird which you can release elsewhere. Trapping birds works best early in the growing season when your very first tomatoes begin turning red. Basically, if the only red tomato in your garden is the one inside the trap, then the birds will greedily go for it. I immediately caught four mockingbirds the first time I used my rabbit trap technique and released them several miles away. After that, I only had maybe three or four tomatoes pecked the entire summer (verses about a three ruined tomatoes per day the year before). The trap also works for rabbits. A half ear of corn is good bait, but don't lay the bait on the floor of the trap or you'll catch lots of ants. Hang (suspend) the bait from the roof of the trap to keep ants off it. You might even discover that neighborhood cats love corn also. Thanks all, CharlieCom

We had the same thing happen to us, but it was a male. We put in a new window on the side of our house, and a male cardinal flew into the window and 'attacked" it repeatedly... it went on all day long for months. I printed out a picture of a hawk and taped it to the window... that didn't help. Perhaps the size wasn't right or I picked out a wrong hawk... or my cardinal was too smart. My husband eventually put up some chicken wire on the outside of the window.. that stopped him. We left it on for a few months. The cardinal stayed away. We thought we were ok to take it off and when we did the cardinal came back, lol. I am not sure what was the reason... I thought perhaps the male saw his reflection and thought he needed to attack another cardinal? Not sure.. but in any case, he hasn't come back in the past year and I"m happy to not have chickenwire on my window.

Yes- this has been another irruption year for the most part. Not quite 2011's numbers but a good amount have come down this year, especially in the eastern states. Snowy Owl irruptions are cyclical: good food sources result in more offspring, more offspring result in food shortages. Snowies migrate this far south for food. They are very out of their element here and they do this out of desperation. Many of these Snowies never make it back to the Arctic. It's just something to keep in mind as we enjoy these rare viewing opportunities; the Snowy Owls we are viewing are most likely in a stressed state. Thanks for posting the beautiful photo. This post was edited by TMFF on Thu, Dec 26, 13 at 15:45