Injured Birds of Prey Get Second Chance to Soar at Rehabilitation Center

A peregrine falcon, fastest creature on Earth, crashes into a Manhattan skyscraper. A red-tailed hawk snatching up a mouse is broadsided by a car on the interstate. An osprey is shot out of the sky.

Twenty years ago, these broken birds of prey would have been doomed. Today, they’re getting a second chance to soar at the Hudson Valley Raptor Center.

Fall is the busiest time of year for the center, on a 91-acre former horse farm overlooking the Catskill Mountains 75 miles north of New York City. It’s migration time.

Over the next few months, thousands of hawks, owls, eagles and other raptors--birds of prey--will soar over the Hudson Valley, a major north-south route in the Atlantic flyway.

Some of the birds won’t reach their wintering grounds.

“Here’s a male peregrine falcon who came to us two years ago,” said Dona Lakin Tracy, 46, who founded the raptor center with her husband, Glen Tracy, in 1982. “He was banded as a baby in his nest in Alaska in July and flew all the way to Long Island by September. He hit a power line.”

“They say peregrines are the fastest animals on Earth,” Dona Tracy said, gazing through wood slats into the falcon’s 12-by-24-foot cage. “They fold their wings and drop out of the sky in pursuit of prey, reaching speeds of 200 m.p.h. That’s probably what he was doing when he hit that wire.”

The falcon, an endangered species, is unlikely to fly again. His wing was bandaged too long after surgery by a veterinarian inexperienced with raptors. “The muscles atrophy and the joints calcify if you don’t start exercise within a couple of weeks,” Dona Tracy said.

“This is Blue, our osprey,” she said, stepping to another pen where a gray and white eagle-like bird gave a piercing scream. The osprey, a fish-eater with a six-foot wingspan, is a threatened species.

“She was shot right through the chest and out through the back during fall migration three years ago,” Dona Tracy said. “We’re hopeful she’ll be released some day.”

Blue eats fish donated by a local market. Hatcheries donate chicks for bird-eaters like peregrine falcons. Breeders of laboratory animals donate mice and rats. The center’s raptors eat 300 rodents and 80 chicks a day.

There is a growing national network of rehabilitation centers specializing in raptors. The Hudson Valley center is unusual in that it has large flight cages, designed by Dona Tracy, to allow plenty of exercise. The flight complex is 80 feet wide, 100 feet long and 16 feet high. It is divided into two long central flyways connected by sliding panels to 10 smaller cages.

“The flight cages have made a tremendous difference in the birds we’ve been able to release,” Dona Tracy said. “Other rehabilitators have sent us birds they’d considered hopeless, and after proper exercise we were able to let them go.”

Without flight cages, birds must practice flying while tethered to 200-foot lines attached to a short leather strap attached to a leg. But that’s stressful for birds and can break the legs of some species.

For every 100 birds brought to the center, about 60 are eventually released, Dona Tracy said. About 20 die. Another 20 remain in captivity, here or elsewhere, with permanent disabilities.

There are about 120 raptors at the center now, including about 30 permanent residents. They range from charming, pocket-sized saw-whet owls to a majestic bald eagle with a six-foot wingspan and an eye shot with a BB gun.

Some of the unreleasable birds rear orphaned nestlings. Others are used in educational programs at the center and at malls, schools, fairs and civic meetings in New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts and Connecticut.

Of the 28 species of raptors found in New York state, Dona Tracy said, nine are endangered or threatened.

“The ones on the decline are the ones that need a specific habitat or type of prey,” she said, holding a slender owl, white with black flecks, on a gloved hand. “Barn owls, like McKeever here, are rare in the wild now. They like big open grasslands. Unfortunately, that’s also prime habitat for shopping centers.”

McKeever hatched in an incubator from an egg found in a nest at a Brooklyn demolition site six years ago. Because she became imprinted on humans--that is, she identifies with humans rather than owls--she can never be freed.

“Imprinting isn’t tameness,” Dona Tracy said. “In fact, imprinted birds can be unusually aggressive toward humans,” because they defend their territory against people rather than birds. After an imprinted great horned owl swooped down and sunk its talons in her scalp while she cleaned its cage, Tracy said she started wearing a hard hat around the big birds.

B.J., a red-tailed hawk with a four-foot wingspan and the visage of a golden eagle, is another imprinted bird. She was raised in captivity, and later bitten severely when she tried to catch a squirrel in the wild.

Elizabeth, a glossy black turkey vulture with a five-foot wingspan and a red, wrinkled head, has the cage next to B.J.’s. “She was hit by a truck and had two detached retinas,” Dona Tracy said. “She can see, but not well enough to miss a power line.”

She said such man-made hazards as cars, pesticides, guns, traps, power lines and suburban sprawl are responsible for the decline of some raptor species and the injuries to all the ones brought to the center.