The pelican at Dojran was shot with a shotgun: two weeks of waiting until fishermen found it a vet

For two weeks visitors to Dojran saw the same thing: a lone pelican moving over the water and the shore unusually close to people. It was photographed, filmed, posted all over social media. Nobody knew why the bird had not left with the flock.

The answer came when the vet Risto Ičkov from Bogdanci, working with the Food and Veterinary Agency and the mayor of Dojran, Ilija Tentov, finally went out to the site. The pelican had been hit by shotgun pellets under the wing.

"The bird most likely came from the south and from what I could establish, it was hit by a shotgun under the wing. On the right side there are signs of fallen feathers and the flesh has blackened, which means it had a wound. We managed to examine it; catching the pelican was easy given that it was already exhausted," says Ičkov.

That "catching it was easy" is the line that hurts most. A wild bird you can pick up with your hands is a bird that no longer has the strength to flee.

The vet established there was no broken wing or leg, as tourists had speculated. He cleaned the wound and gave antibiotics, vitamins and therapy. Dojran fishermen brought a kilo of fresh small fish, and the mayor arranged a shelter - a permanent home for the bird with a daily food supply.

The pelican, or "babla" in the Dojran dialect, is a bird that lives in a flock. According to the vet, its companions will return in about a month and it may leave with them.

The Food and Veterinary Agency said it is working on legal amendments for animal protection and plans to develop a wildlife centre. Planning is exactly the word that keeps coming back - the centre still does not exist, and in the meantime a village is improvising a shelter to keep one wounded bird alive.

And here is the part nobody is saying out loud. The pelican did not injure itself. Someone shot a protected species with a shotgun on one of the three natural lakes in this country, and that made no institution come out with a statement. The two-week wait for the bird to get a vet was organised by no institution at all - it was solved by fishermen, one vet from Bogdanci and one mayor.