Moving Day, December 7, 1999

Yesterday Alan said that being a chess champion is nothing compared to what we have to do moving birds from one cage to another.  At our large bird rehabilitation center, as the health each bird grows, so should the size of the cage.  But the logistics often confound us because we usually have more birds than cages to house them.  So while two birds are getting cage exercise prior to release in one of our bigger flight cages, five may be waiting in smaller cages, like a batting lineup.  We must wait for the lead-off batter to get to first, maybe a double, and the bases behind the batter open, and the next batter steps up. In other words: we must wait for the large cages to be empty by releasing their inmates before we move more birds on.

The ideas behind the moving of birds also are pertinent: are we working against time, trying to release a bird during migration?  That bird can jump the line-up.  Are we going to overwinter the bird?  An overwintering bird can wait, but not a bird that has to move with the season.

So here’s what we did today:

At 9 AM we boxed and shipped a Broad-winged hawk and an Osprey to Florida (both having missed migration by recuperating at our center for a number of months) to be released tomorrow.  Moving the Broadie was key, as that opened up what we call our Small Flight cage, which is 75’x25’.

The players were now in motion: as soon we cleaned that now-empty cage, Jeff and I moved two Red-tailed hawks and a Turkey vulture from the smaller Crow cages into the waiting Small Flight.  When we entered its cage, the vulture, from its high perch, greeted us by unleashing yesterday’s meal.  It is a rotten, fetid substance, vulture vomit.  While Jeff netted the vulture and I cleaned up the cage, Jean moved two more Red-tails into the Small Flight.   So now there were four Red-tails and a Turkey vulture in the Small Flight, ready for flight exercise they could not have gotten in the smaller cages.

Jeff and I went to the Waterfowl Cage, where there were two young Snowy owls. Snowy Owls are the largest and heaviest owls in North America at 1.6 kg, or almost 4 pounds.  The Snowies, this year's babies, were hatched and raised by our resident, unreleasable adult Snowies.  Now they are juveniles, fully as large if not fatter than their parents.   We each netted and grabbed a huge and annoyed young Snowy, and moved them into The Cage Next to Tiger, which Jean had just emptied of its Red-tail inmates.  We are waiting for the government paperwork to allow us to take the youngsters to Kay Mckeever’s Owl Foundation in Ontario, where they will stay until they are released in Manitoba next spring.  Why were the Snowies in the waterfowl cage?  It’s big, and so are they, and we wanted them to get some exercise.    The Waterfowl Cage was the only large cage available at the time.

Moving out the Snowies opened up the Waterfowl cage, in which there is a large pool for swimming birds.  We needed the pool to make sure a Black duck (recovering from a broken leg) could swim properly.  And a juvenile Mute swan in a small recovery cage must be in water. We also needed to test-fly and exercise two Ring-billed gulls.  Jeffrey took the swan and a gull, I took the duck and a gull, and after 10 minutes of moving these four birds from the various cages on the Trust’s 17 acres, we met in the Waterfowl cage.

And there they were: a surly Mute swan, a very nervous Black duck and two happy gulls. The swan immediately began to harass the duck, and the very high strung duck flew repeatedly across the cage, bouncing off the netted sides.  

Bad swan.  The duck, we feared, would hurt itself in the cage.  We confirmed that it could indeed fly and swim, so I was assigned the job of releasing it in The Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge.  I packed up the Black duck in a carrier, drove deep into the Swamp, and released it.  The Black duck skittered into the water.  Home run.  Hundreds of mallards and blacks swirled in the sky, dazzling me.

Back to the center.  I netted and released a House finch from the Finch Cage and moved three more House finches that were treated in the infirmary for two weeks into the cage just vacated.

Soon after that Jean asked me to hold a Red-tailed hawk for for her to examine.  The hawk could not stand (it had wacked itself into a window trying to get out of a warehouse) and suffered, we think, some central nervous system damage, from which it may or may not recover.  We had to be sure nothing was broken.  Jean examined its left leg while I held the other leg and the bird’s head, to keep it from footing or biting her.

“Hmmm. I don’t know if this foot works,” she mused.  Then that foot reached over and grabbed my bare right hand, impaling my middle finger with a very large, sharp talon at the end of its very powerful working Red-tail foot.

“It works,” I hissed, “the foot definitely works. Get… it… off… me...please.”  The trick in getting unloosed from a raptor’s angry talons is to go limp, as if you were a dead squirrel.

Any small movement on the captive’s part incites the raptor to dig in deeper for the kill.  This is difficult, because being footed hurts.  I tried to think of puppies playing in a soft bed  While I held onto the other foot, Jean pried the talons off my hand.  She sent me to clean myself up and dress the wound.

I did.  I am, by necessity, very good in general with first aid.

It was three o'clock.  The game was finally over in twelve innings.  My back hurt, my finger was swollen and now frozen, claw-like, and my clothes were splattered with in a variety of bird substances.

But I did not get puked on by the vulture.