Back to nature: Boat-injured manatee recovers, returned to Marco Island waters

MARCO ISLAND — A team of rescuers lifted a manatee nicknamed Caxy out of the back of a delivery truck and back into its home waters around Marco Island on Monday to the cheers of onlookers.

"It's probably the most amazing thing I've ever seen," said Lisa Vaturi, 50, a visitor from near Youngstown, Ohio, who happened upon the scene at the Caxambas Pass Park boat ramp. "It truly was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity."

After weeks of hunting her down this April, rescuers captured the female manatee in Caxambas Pass and took her to Lowry Park Zoo in Tampa to be nursed back to health. A boat strike had left her with a fractured rib and a punctured lung.

Collier County has tallied two manatee deaths from boat strikes out of a total of five manatee deaths so far this year. Lee County, with a state-leading 48 total manatee deaths so far this year, also leads the state in manatee deaths caused by boat strikes with 14.

In a 10-county area that stretches from the Keys to north of Lake Okeechobee, marine mammal responders have recovered 66 dead manatees compared to rescuing 15 of them, according to state figures. Caxy was one of the few that made it back home.

"This is a positive end result," said Denise Boyd, manatee biologist for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. "It doesn't happen often."

At Lowry Park Zoo's marine mammal hospital, Caxy's caretakers treated her with antibiotics and plenty of food — romaine lettuce, endive, escarole, hydrilla and water hyacinth. The manatee couldn't dive because of air in her chest cavity, which veterinarians tapped to remove the air.

Caxy gained more than 200 pounds at the zoo, weighing in at more than 1,000 pounds when the April rescue crew reunited at the boat ramp Monday to help Caxy make the last few feet of her journey back home.

Caxy made the trip from Tampa on a bed of thick foam pads in the back of the truck. Zoo workers kept the manatee wetted down on the way. At the ramp, a dozen men and women strained in unison to lift the manatee, lying calmly in a blue tarp, down the truck's ramp and to the water's edge.

Boyd gave bystanders a brief chance to touch the manatee — Vaturi's husband, Shani, described it as like a hard rubber tire — and snap pictures before carrying the manatee on a rubber mat into the water. When the water was deep enough for Caxy to float, she swam gently away.

No "Free Willy" moment, but the satisfaction of seeing a manatee injured by human activity and then rehabilitated by humans is enough for Lowry Park zoo keeper Jennifer Galbraith.

"It's amazing to know you've set to right something that's been unnecessarily interrupted," Galbraith said.