A bird has been sent back into the wild after getting stuck in a glue trap in Kildare.
Glue traps are illegal in Ireland and can see animals trapped on a flat piece of wood or plastic.
The robin was handed into the Kildare Wildlife Rescue charity last month and was eventually nursed back to health.
Manager Dan Donoher told Moncrieff it is a very cruel mechanism.
"It just traps them in the trap on the glue, and obviously as they struggle and move around they get more and more caught up in it," he said.
"It's a very cruel way of catching rodents.
"The robin would have got in accidentally, it would have been set out for rodents in a shed and then the robin just flew down on top of it and sadly got stuck in it.
"From the neck down the bird was encased in the glue," he said.
"It's legs, feathers, everything had a hard substance around it - it could barely move its head".
A little story of a Robin that got caught in an illegal glue trap… pic.twitter.com/hz4ouoQZKF
— Kildare Wildlife Rescue (@WildlifeKildare) January 10, 2024
Mr Donoher said the important thing to do is to warm up the bird and get fluids into them.
"We gave him some pain relief as well because he would have been in pain," he said.
"Then we put him in an oxygen chamber because he was quite stressed.
"We kept him there for 24 hours and he was quite strong at that stage, so we then started the process of getting the glue off him.
"That took over two days to take it off".
'A strong little character'
Mr Donoher said this process had to be repeated the following day, before the bird was put under observation for a week.
"He was a strong little character to survive all that," he said.
"We kept him for a week after that just to make sure he was eating well and putting on weight.
"We also used a light spray to make sure that his feathers were waterproofed.
"We were happy that he was able to fly and we were able to bring him back out into the wild then.
"It was a really good rescue."
Mr Donoher said the bird was brought in by the person who set the trap "who realised they did wrong."
He added that this was the first time he has treated an animal from a glue trap which are mostly homemade.
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