BATON ROUGE - The LSU School of Veterinary Medicine said that its Wildlife Hospital of Louisiana has had to treat a substantially higher number of Mississippi kite birds compared to this time last year.

What concerns them is how many of these birds have gunshot wounds.

"We've already hit about 20 birds over last year's number at this time. So we're at 48 birds now, and that's just Mississippi kites in general. With gunshots specifically, we have 11 that are either suspected and then seven that are confirmed with radiographs with the pellets in them," second-year Wildlife Hospital resident Zoey Lex said.

Hospital staff says that, as of last year, they only had two Mississippi kites with gunshot wounds.

The Mississippi kite is protected by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, meaning that it is illegal to hunt or kill them.

"What they're getting shot with most that we can see is pellets, so it's kind of the air-fired guns. I'm worried that they're mainly shooting them for sport, just with how they glide in the air," Lex said.

Bird specialists say these birds pose no threat to humans.

"They're birds of prey, so they do prey on other species, although for Mississippi kites, they're primarily feeding on flying insects, and then maybe also some smaller reptiles and other invertebrate species," Baton Rouge Audubon Society Vice President Katie Percy said.

Lex says that the birds mostly feed on insects.

"They'll eat like carnivores now and then, so mice, amphibians, stuff like that, but mainly insectivores, so they're really good at taking care of agricultural pests," Lex added.

The hospital says the birds fly here from South America during the summer months for the breeding season and that they're actually pretty common to see around Louisiana until they start flying back to South America around August and September.

"We see a lot of babies during the summer, and it is the adults and the babies that are both getting shot that we see here. They will roost in pretty tall trees and anywhere, so we see them down the street from the vet school itself," Lex said.

According to the hospital, many of these injured birds are coming from areas of southern Louisiana like Baton Rouge, Zachary, Lafayette and New Orleans.

While at the hospital, WBRZ was shown an X-ray of a Mississippi kite that was examined on Tuesday. According to the hospital, the bird in the X-ray had to be put down because a pellet went through a bone in its wing and into a joint.

"Anything that includes a joint is going to render them unable to fly, and they're not a type of bird that would be easily kept in captivity as they're a wild animal and they're more accustomed to being out there in the wild," Lex said.

Although it is part of the LSU Vet School, the Wildlife Hospital of Louisiana runs entirely on private donations.

"We don't get any support from the school or the government themselves, so we run solely on private donations," Lex said. "We're trying to get a bigger space and a new standalone wildlife hospital. We're trying to raise money for that so we can help more and more animals every day. People can either donate in person or they can donate online through the LSU Foundation, and they just have to pick the wildlife hospital specifically."

The Baton Rouge Audubon Society says, that due to conservation efforts throughout the years, the population of Mississippi kites has stabilized.

"We have a stable population of Mississippi kites; they are still protected by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, and so that act protects over 1,000 species of migratory birds that are native to the United States and North America," Percy said.