Yesterday I traveled with the Biology Club to the Raptor Rehabilitation Center in Fairmont, WV. Although the group rehabilitating the raptors has been around for longer than most of the students who attended have been alive, the center itself is so new that the floor has not yet been put over the concrete. We were introduced to three of the birds that are education birds, meaning that they will never been released into the wild. One of these, Thunder, is a female bald eagle who had been shot through the wing when still a juvenile. Being only 7 or 8 feet away from a live bald eagle was incredible, something for which photographs could never prepare a person. When she flapped her wings, the draft across the room was amazing; you could just imagine how strong an uninjured bird would be.
I have seen hawks and owls up close before so I was not as impressed with meeting Neo, the red shouldered hawk, and Rupert, the little screech owl, but we were able to watch as the volunteers put one red shouldered hawk through a test flight. They put jesses on the hawk and attached him to a heavy duty ocean fishing line and rod. He flew three times while they evaluated his flight to determine if he will be make a full enough recovery to be released. This particular bird is near the end of his stay and so the first flight was a bit weak and wobbly, but the second and third were beautiful to watch.
After all this excitement, the students put in some community service by helping to cut and attach shade screening to the cages that are being constructed for the birds. With so many hands, the work went quickly and we managed to get the material cut and attached for 2/3 of the cages, leaving to be done only those cages that yet need to have dividing walls.
Because they have not yet fully moved into the facilities, we were also able to get a behind the scenes tour of the infirmary where they will be housing more severely injured birds. It was not unlike being in the back room of the veterinarian's office, with metal cages, freezers, cabinets, and counter space for working. In this case, however, the cages all face the back wall, so the birds are not distracted by what is going on, and the area between the cages and the back wall had a drop ceiling to keep too much light from reaching into the cages, with a separate bank of lights on the wall to allow the workers to see what they are doing when they need to access the cages.
The director also talked with us a little about the life cycle of the various birds, informing us that Thunder, the bald eagle, had not laid an egg until she was 8 years old. He also explained that she did not get the distinctive white head and tail until she was in her 6th molt. When he first acquired her, more than 20 years ago, he said there were no photos of juvenile bald eagles to be found anywhere, and without those characteristic white feathers, most people did not recognizer her as a bald eagle. I got to show off a bit then, because I do know what a juvenile bald eagle looks like, since there were several living along the river in Maryland. If you don't know, in the air they look not completely unlike an osprey but with much less white on the underside.
Unfortunately, the director also had some very interesting ideas about science and expressed some hostility towards the scientific community that made some of the students a little uncomfortable and made me very uncomfortable. I was proud of my students, however, because they attempted an intelligent debate with him and, on the trip back to campus, were able to express respect for his work with the birds while at the same time disagreeing with him on his "beliefs" regarding some current science. They were also able to express valid criticisms with some of the hypotheses he expressed about bird behavior and vision and come up with good alternative explanations for the behavior he described.
