Werehunter (anthology)

First is “baby season,” which actually extends from late February through to July, beginning with Great Horned Owl babies and ending when the second round of American Kestrels (sparrowhawks, or “spawks” as falconers affectionately call them) begins to push their siblings out of nests. The first rule of baby season is—try to get the baby back into the nest, or something like the nest. Mother birds are infinitely better at taking care of their youngsters than any human, so when wind or weather send babies (eyases, is the correct term) tumbling, that is our first priority. This almost always involves climbing, which means that poor Larry puts on his climbing gear and dangles from trees. When nest and all have come down, we supply a substitute, in as close to the same place as possible; raptor mothers are far more fixated on the kids than the house, and a box filled with branches will do nicely, thank you.

Sometimes, though, it’s not possible to put the eyases back. Youngsters are found with no nest in sight, or the nest is literally unreachable (a Barn Owl roost in the roof of an institution for the criminally insane, for instance), or worst of all, the parents are known to be dead.

Young raptors eat a lot. Kestrels need feeding ­every hour or so, bigger birds every two to three, and that’s from dawn to dusk. We’ve taken eyases with us to doctor’s appointments, on vacation, on shopping expe­ditions, and even to racing school! And we’re not talking Gerber’s here; “mom” (us) gets to take the mousie, dissect the mousie, and feed the mousie parts to baby. By hand. Yummy! Barred Owl eyases are the easiest of the lot; they’ll take minnows, which are of a size to slip down their little throats easily, but not the rest. There’s no use thinking you can get by with a little chicken, either—growing babies need a lot of calcium for those wonderful hollow bones that they’re growing so fast, so they need the whole animal.

Fortunately, babies do grow up, and eventually they’ll feed themselves. Then it’s just a matter of helping them learn to fly (which involves a little game we call “Hawk Tossing”) and teaching them to hunt. The instincts are there; they just need to connect instinct with practice. But this is not for the squeamish or the tender-hearted; for the youngsters to grow up and have the skills to make them successful, they have to learn to kill.

The second season can stretch from late April to August, and we call it “silly fledgling season.” That’s when the eyases, having learned to fly at last, get lost. Raptor mothers—with the exception of Barn Owls—continue to feed the youngsters and teach them to hunt after they’ve fledged, but sometimes wind and weather again carry the kids off beyond finding their way back to mom. Being inexperienced flyers and not hunters at all yet, they usually end up helpless on the ground, which is where we come in.

These guys are actually the easiest and most reward­ing; they know the basics of flying and hunting, and all we have to do is put some meat back on their bones and give them a bit more experience. We usually have anywhere from six to two dozen kestrels at this stage every year, which is when we get a fair amount of exercise, catching grasshoppers for them to hunt.

Then comes the “inexpert hunter” season, and I’m not referring to the ones with guns. Some raptors are the victims of a bad winter, or the fact that they concentrated on those easy-to-kill grasshoppers while their siblings had graduated to more difficult prey. Along about December, we start to get the ones that nothing much is wrong with except starvation. Sometimes starvation has gone too far for them to make it; frus­trating and disappointing for us.

We’ve gotten all sorts of birds over the years; our wonderful vet, Dr. Paul Welch (on whom may blessings be heaped!) treats wildlife for free, and knows that we’re always suckers for a challenge, so he has gotten some of the odder things to us. We’ve had two Great Blue Herons, for instance. One was an adult that had collided with a powerline. It had a dreadful fracture, and we weren’t certain if it would be able to fly again (it did) but since we have a pond, we figured we could support a land-bound heron. In our ignorance, we had no idea that Great Blues are terrible challenges to keep alive because they are so shy; we just waded right in, force-feeding it minnows when it refused to eat, and stuffing the minnows right back down when it tossed them up. This may not sound so difficult, but remember that a Great Blue has a two-foot sword on the end of its head, a spring-loaded neck to put some force behind the stab, and the beak-eye coordination to impale a minnow in a foot of water. It has no trouble targeting your eye.

We fed it wearing welding-masks.

We believe very strongly in force-feeding; our experi­ence has been that if you force-feed a bird for two to three days, it gives up trying to die of starvation and begins eating on its own. Once again, mind you, this is not always an easy proposition; we’re usually dealing with fully adult birds who want nothing whatsoever to do with us, and have the equipment to enforce their preferences. We very seldom get a bird that is so injured that it gives us no resistance. Great Horned Owls can exert pressure of 400 ft/lbs per talon, which can easily penetrate a Kevlar-lined welding glove, as I know personally and painfully.

That is yet another aspect of rehabbing that most people don’t think about—injury. Yours, not the bird’s. We’ve been “footed” (stabbed with talons), bitten, pooped on (okay, so that’s not an injury, but it’s not pleasant), gouged, and beak-slashed. And we have to stand there and continue doing whatever it was that earned us those injuries, because it certainly isn’t the bird’s fault that he doesn’t recognize the fact that you’re trying to help him.

We also have to know when we’re out of our depth, or when the injury is so bad that the bird isn’t releasable, and do the kind and responsible thing. Unless a bird is so endangered that it can go into a captive breeding project, or is the rare, calm, quiet case like Cinnamon who will be a perfect education bird, there is no point in keeping one that can’t fly or hunt again. You learn how to let go and move on very quickly, and just put your energy into the next one.

On the other hand, we have personal experience that raptors are a great deal tougher than it might appear. We’ve successfully released one-eyed hawks, who learn to compensate for their lack of binocular vision very well. Birds with one “bad” leg learn to strike only with the good one. One-eyed owls are routine for us now; owls mostly hunt by sound anyway and don’t actually need both eyes. But the most amazing is that another rehabber in our area has routinely gotten successful releases with owls that are minus a wingtip; evidently owls are such strong fliers that they don’t need their entire wingspan to prosper, and that is quite amazing and heartening.