Raptor Rehab # 3 of 3

This is Alida, a bald eagle recovering here at the Raptor Rehabilitation Center. He was brought in with a broken wing, the wing has been repaired and the staff is working with him to get him prepared for life back in the wild. Unlike some of the permanent residents, we don't want to get to close to Alida. He needs to maintain his natural fear of humans to protect him when he reenters the wild. Eagles are just really intense. You can see in their faces why they were chosen as our national symbol. For everyone that works at the Raptor Rehabilitation Project there's one special day, a moment when all of their hard work with these amazing animals seems well worth the effort. We're talking about the day an injured bird is able to return to its life in the wild. Seeing a wild bird fly off is the big payback, and that's just what we are going to do today. Simon is the name of the bird that we are going to release today. Simon is a juvenile barred owl. Somebody found Simon as a baby about two months ago and he was orphaned. He didn't have his parents around, so they brought Simon to the Conservation Department, and brought Simon over to us. We took care of him for about two months, but now he's doing really well. He's not injured and he's hunting mice on his own and he can fly. So we are really excited because now he's going to get to go back out into the woods, into the wilderness. And that's really what we are all about. We're trying to get the birds healthy and back out where they belong. These birds are not going to want to walk up to you and just say here, release me. So we're going to have to catch him. So hopefully he stays nice and low like that. get caught up in the net. That actually went pretty well. Sometimes they can get tangled up. We put a towel over his head because that calms them down and they don't struggle as much. We don't want him to struggle and hurt himself again. Simon is about 4 months old, we think, so he's ready to go out on his own. When he came in he was just a little fuzz ball of an owl. Yeah, let's wrap him up more. Ready to go outside to be released. Well when you put so much effort into seeing a bird come in injured or orphaned and working with it, feeding it, making sure that it grows, weighing it, watching every single aspect of its health and maturation, it's pretty exciting to see it released. But then there is also that maternal parental instinct, when you see them go you're like, oh it's too soon. Are we doing the right thing? So what we are going to do here, we're going to take one of the towels off. And then I am going to place him down and move the towel back from him and let him go on his own. So it's as low stress as possible. As you guys can see this is a nice area, there's lots of trees here, there is some open area too. So hopefully he can take off and fly a little ways and have a tree he can rest in and take a break and kind of reevaluate his surroundings and figure out where he wants to live from now on. Go Simon. Yeah! This happens a lot. That those little birds fly around them. It feels really good. A lot of the birds that come in, their injuries are so bad that we can't release them. So when we finally get to release one it's just a wonderful feeling. It really feels like we are making a difference to that bird and the species in general. There he goes. Yeah! Feels really good. All the hard work paid off. You have so much invested at the point where you get to release it, even if it's only been here a couple of months, some of them are here six months or longer. And you have so much invested in this bird. And you've spent so much time with it that you know we just really hope that it goes well out there. You know we are all worried about how it's going to do tonight. Will it find a good home? Will it be able to hunt? We know that we've done the best we can and hopefully it will go out there and have a really successful life.