When Brent Lodge Wildlife Hospital founder Dennis Fenter and his wife Yvonne went to Chichester Marina to take their dog for a walk, they weren't expecting to be involved in rescuing a bird!

Walking across the lock gates at the Marina entrance from Chichester Harbour, they spotted a Little Egret on the water's edge, and remarked that it was in the same place as the one they had photographed the evening before. The bird then tried to fly up and it was immediately apparent that it couldn't - it was firmly attached to fishing line that was caught around a rock. And since the tide was coming in, the bird was in imminent danger of drowning!

Being near to the lock gates and the main entrance channel to the Marina, it was obvious that trying to walk across the mud to the bird to rescue it would be too dangerous because of the depth of the mud.

So Yvonne enlisted the help of lock-keeper Ian Baird, who very kindly offered to take her out in a boat to rescue the bird.

Upon reaching the bird, Ian and Yvonne managed to catch it, and were absolutely horrified at what they found attached to it. There was a tangle of about 25 yards of fishing line, two large fishing weights, and a few fishing hooks of various sizes, including one that had gone through the bird's foot to trap it.

The bird was clearly exhausted from it's efforts to escape. If it was the same one that Dennis and Yvonne had seen the evening before, then it had somehow managed to survive a high tide. There was just about enough free line to enable the bird to swim above the rock on which it was ensnared, but since Egrets are wading birds, rather than swimming ones, swimming to stay alive must have totally exhausted the bird.

The hook was removed from the bird's foot, and it was taken to Brent Lodge where it was put on a course of antibiotics for its foot injury, and rested and fed. At the time of writing, it is expected that it will be fit enough to release back to Chichester Harbour within a week.

The Little Egret is one of the Chichester area's success stories. It is a small white heron, about half the size of the commonly seen Grey Heron. The bird has attractive feathers, and at one time, the plumes of the Little Egret were in great demand for decorating hats, and so hunting reduced the population of the species to dangerously low levels. Now that conservation laws protect the bird, the population has rebounded strongly. They established a nationally important stronghold on Thorney Island a few years ago, and are now thriving and very common in Chichester Harbour and Pagham Harbour.

Hopefully the bird that Ian and Yvonne rescued will soon be back in the wild, but there is still the ever-present threat from discarded fishing line. Fishermen frequently use the Marina and Harbour, and it has to be said that most of them act very responsibly, ensuring that their waste fishing line is gathered up, cut into small pieces, and disposed of safely. However, when a fishing line is cast and snags on a rock and then breaks, the hook and line is left behind on the rock, and clearly such an accumulation of hooks and lines is what caught this particular bird.

So the message from Brent Lodge to fishermen is ... do please continue to dispose of your waste line safely where it can't do any harm. But if you are aware of an area where your hook can snag on underwater rocks and break, then please don't fish there and risk leaving hooks and line behind to trap unwary birds. This rescued Egret was lucky, and saved from a slow and horrible death, but many other birds aren't.