So you think your vision is good? Check out this great article on bird vision . . http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/02/100216101159.htm

Nick, TRAC's female Red Tailed Hawk ambassador on her nest platform while Kendra, TRAC's female Red Shouldered Hawk oversees the progress. 3-14-09

The week started off kind of quietly, catching up on office related tasks and beginning to organize the monitoring process to see if Peregrine Falcons have returned to the New River Gorge yet.  A survey on the 5th turned up one, 2 more were spotted on the 12th.  (See updates in the New River Gorge Peregrine Restoration Project category).  More work with the new ambassador Merlin named Jack is producing good results; he now is hopping up on the glove most of the time, and has no worries about eating while being watched.  As he’s gotten more relaxed, his personality is more and more engaging.  We’re looking forward to introducing him to the public before too long.  Saturday the 14th was the 2nd annual Spring Eagle Watch on the New and Bluestone Rivers and Bluestone Lake.  Cold, fog, and drizzly rain kept most birds out of the air, but we did have one mature bald eagle between the Bluestone Boat Ramp under the Lilly Bridge on Rt 20 and the Bluestone State Park Fishing Pier, one immature flew over the Bertha campground near the Bluestone Conference Center and one adult flew through from the Dam up the Lake to the Lilly Bridge and went over the hill on the far side.  There is a bit of discussion about whether to include the last eagle, even though it was an adult, since it showed up at 2:03 pm, 3 minutes after the survey was supposed to end.  I maintain that eagle time management is different from humans’, so the bird should count…

As promised last week, here is a picture of the nest building progress in the cage shared by Nick and Kendra.  During the week, the nesting material has been shifted, thrown out, put back in, fiddled with and some of it thrown out again.  Kendra, the female Red Shouldered Hawk seems to be on guard duty mostly while Nick, the female Red Tailed Hawk gets to work on construction duty.  We’ve provided a smorgasbord of  nesting materials from fine little twigs to larger diameter sticks, bark of all sorts and textures, moss and leaves.  It hasn’t been unusual at all to come in one day to find the nest almost completed and the next to find all or most of the material thrown on the ground in the middle of the cage.  At one point it looked as if she or Kendra had decided to build another nest under the platform on the ground, but that idea seems to have been abandoned (whew!).  Both birds are very much into the construction/interior decorating process.  It is not unusual to hear Kendra mouthing off at one of the other raptor ambassadors or a wild bird that gets too interested or too close to the proceedings.  As of this writing the nest has a few smaller diameter sticks and shredded inner bark inside it.   When I tried to get a closer shot of the cage and nesting activities, both birds became vocal and territorial so this is the best picture they would allow.  Talk about homeland security measures!

Birds In/Out: A tufted titmouse hit a window and ended up with a pretty good concussion.  After a bit of R & R and some medications for the headache, he healed up fine and was released.  A red morph screech owl was found after being hit by a car in the road near Saint Albans in Kanawha County and turned in to our hospice veterinarians at Kanawha Valley Animal Emergency Clinic.  Exam showed head trauma resulting in concussion, no broken bones and lots of spunk.  Within a few days he was doing quite well and beginning to fight the walls of his room, so we released him.  A Red Tailed Hawk was hit by a truck outside the Dominion Power Plant at Mount Storm on Tuesday.  Mostly the collision just rolled the hawk, resulting in “road rash” abraisions on the tops of one of his feet and an abraision to his eye.  Allen and Holly Canfield, rehabilitation technicians with TRAC rescued it and it is now doing well.  The feet are healing up, but it will take another couple of weeks of medications in the eye to heal the ulcer.  The last bird in during the week was a coopers hawk who had a very badly broken humerus (the bone below the shoulder on the wing).  The injury was quite old and infected, but the worst part was that the bone tissue had died completely.  Since there was no hope of repair beyond amputation of the entire wing (which the US Fish and Wildlife Service no longer allows) we had to euthanize him.

This next week is the annual Spring cleaning of the mews, flight barn rooms and cages now that all the ice and snow are gone and we can really scrub surfaces again.  Also we will be monitoring peregrine falcon activity in the New River Gorge and preparing for the following week’s presentations and Wildlife Diversity Day at the Capitol Rotunda on March 26th.  Drop us a line with your thoughts or ideas – we’re always glad to hear from you!        -Wendy Perrone, TRAC Executive Director

Trish Miller, researcher with the National Aviary, and male Golden Eagle at Rimel Wildlife Management Area. Photo courtesy of Barbara Sargent, WV Dept of Natural Resources, 3-3-09

There has been a smorgasbord of activity here this week.   Tuesday we were invited to join WV Dept of Natural Resources and the National Aviary to help capture some wild golden eagles in the Rimel Wildlife Management Area, gather some DNA and body measurements, fit them each with a transmitter back pack and release them for further tracking.  For a full account of the day’s activities, including pictures of the male and female golden eagles we worked with that day, visit the TRAC Blog’s  Golden Eagle Tracking Study section  (see menu column on the right side of  this page).  Wednesday was all about preparing promo fliers and poster for for the annual TRAC Migration Celebration festival coming up on May 9  (the flier and MC 09 schedule will be posted soon in the Announcements section of the Blog).   Peregrine Falcon monitoring began in the New River Gorge on Thursday to see who may return.  Further updates on this project will be posted in the TRAC Blog’s  New River Gorge Peregrine Restoration section  (see menu column on the right side of  this page).  Friday and Saturday were all about cleaning cages and doing post-winter maintenence around the TRAC facility.  On Saturday, Nick, our red tailed hawk female, decided it was time to start building a nest, and with the help of her cagemate/friend Kendra, a female red shouldered hawk, they set to work gathering leaves and small twigs that had fallen through the top of the cage.  We built her a deluxe platform and provided more sticks, leaves and bark for her work.  Pictures of the results will be in next weeks Update.  Both birds are working industriously together at the moment.

Birds Out: We were able to send out the red tailed hawk that came in starving from Lewisburg several weeks ago.   The finder agreed to take him right back to the place where he was found for the release: right in his own front yard.  He also had some interesting new information that he didn’t share when we first received the bird:  evidently the red tail was starving  enough that he decided to try to take a small cat for a meal.  When the cat’s owner got home, the cat was badly injured but still alive  and he rushed it to the vet’s office.  (It’s recouperating nicely, thanks to prompt veterinary care and owner nursing).  When he returned from the vets office with his cat, he noticed the red tail sitting exhausted on top of the car port.  The cat’s owner and the red tail’s finder were the same person, and he felt that it was only fair to allow the hawk a chance to find better hunting.  Kudos to him!!!   The coopers hawk that got tangled up in fishing line last week and strained his wrist was released on Saturday.  His feathers were still a bit messed up from the fishing line, but since he is a first year coop he will be molting those damaged feathers in a few weeks.  We decided against replacing them with imped feathers since he was certainly doing alright in the maneuverability department.

Imping is an age-old technique for replacing worn or broken flight feathers that dates back to at least the 1400s.  It is rediculously simple in concept, but requires a bit of practice to achieve the best results.  Feathers have a hollow shaft, called a vane, that runs the length of the feather.  Attached to the vane are the strands of the feather, called fliments, radiating equally off each side.  If you take a magnifying glass and look at the fliments of a flight feather, you will see that both sides of the individual filiments have barbules on them similar to velcro hooks, while the top and bottom are smooth to aid flight.  The barbules hook onto the next filiment over’s barbules to form a kind of fabric consistency, kind of like a zipper holds together two peices of cloth.  The idea is to cut the vane above the damaged area, take another feather in prime condition that matches the species, sex, age and feather location (usually molted from another individual) cut it off to match the way the damaged feather SHOULD have looked, then join the two cut feather shafts together using an interior splint in the hollow vane and fast drying epoxy glue.  As I said, the devil’s in the details – you have to make sure the join is perfect and that the feather is EXACTLY the way it should have been originally in length, alignment and especially making sure the barbules from the damaged feather connect flawlessly with the new replacement.  Once the technique is perfected, it can lead to pretty fast replacements.  We’ve been able to replace an entire red tail hawk tail in under 15 minutes with almost no stress at all to the bird.  When the bird does it’s next molt, the imped feathers are shed normally and new ones grow in just fine.

That’s the update for this week.  We look forward to hearing your comments, etc!

Overall, a pretty quiet week of paperwork, cage cleaning and maintenance work. Yucky weather kept us focused on indoor tasks primarily.   Application forms were mailed out on Thursday to individuals interested in the TRAC Summer Internship or Summer Residency.  Deadline for submitting completed applications is March 10th, then it’s interviews with the applicants.  We’ll make the decision on who to accept on April 1st.   Jack the Merlin is training up very nicely, and we’re looking forward to introducing him to the public before too long.  We’ve added two new pages to the blog: one for updates on this season’s Peregrine Restoration Project (which is starting up soon!), and another on the Golden Eagle Tracking Study currently underway in WV and surrounding States.  The Golden Eagle page is in collaboration with Cully McCurdy and will have many photos if we can figure out how to get them all up on it.  Stay tuned!

Birds Out: A red phased screech owl from a mine site in McDowell County flew out to freedom on Friday the 27th.  He had been hit by a vehicle in mid-December, sustained head and body trauma and was turned in to our staff vet Dr. Bill Streit at All Creatures Veterinary Clinic in Princeton (Mercer County).  It took longer than normal for him to be released after getting over the concussion because one of his eyes collapsed from the injury.  This left him blind in that eye.  We have found that given time, one-eyed screech owls can often learn to adapt to the handicap and go on to live normal lives out in the wild.  He proved up to the adaption challenge, easily maneuvering around placed obstacles in his cage in the flight barn and landing well on all his perches.  He was relocated to Pipestem State Park since the area that he came from has changed significantly due to mining activity.

Birds In: A gray phased screech owl was found in Kanawha County and turned in to Dr. Sarah Stephenson at Good Shepherd Veterinary Hospital (one of our hospice vets)  in Charleston for care on Friday the 21st.  It had been hit by a vehicle and sustained bad head trauma, destroying one eye.  As the week progressed, he became blind in the other eye as well and stopped eating or accepting food, so we had to euthanize him on Saturday the 28th.

A first year male coopers hawk was turned in to Dr. Music at Madison Veterinary Hospital in Logan County (one of our intake points) on Tuesday the 24th.  He was transported up to TRAC Hospice Vet Dr Jeff Patton at Animal Care Associates in Charleston (Kanawha County) where the fishing line he’d gotten himself tangled in was removed from his wing.  Further exam showed that besides a few broken flight feathers, he had sprained his wrist.  He is now healing up in the flight barn.  Coopers hawks are insanely high strung and do not do well in captivity.  It’s always a race to get the bird healed up before they bash themselves to death in a cage.  The flight barn has made it a lot easier to work with these individuals, since the large open space calms them down and gives them safe opportunities to jump, fly and run around and burn off excess energy.  We expect to be able to release this bird later in the coming week.

Mute swan in the New River, with fishing line tangled around its head. The swan on the right was working to free him, and after a couple of days, succeeded.

Fishing Line left out in the environment is one of our pet peeves here.  We’ve seen so many birds and other wildlife (even humans!) tangled and trapped in it and it can lead to disfigurement, dismemberment and death.  The coopers hawk was lucky to have only broken a few feathers and lightly sprained his wrist.  Others are not so lucky.  We’ve seen many times that the bird has struggled so hard and so long that the fishing line has cut into their bodies, shredding feathers, skin, muscle and tendons.  Sometimes they are strangled by it.  Fish hooks left on lines get embedded in throats or legs causing serious injuries and death as well.  And it’s all totally avoidable if people would take their trash home with them.  Fishing line is made of a monofilament that does not break down and decay when left out in the environment.  According to a study done by the Baltimore Aquarium several years ago, the average strand of fishing line can survive up to 700 years when left outside.  When lines get tangled on overhanging trees or shrubs or when it gets caught in debris in the water, fishers will frequently just cut the line and leave it, creating a life threatening hazard for centuries to come.   We urge everyone to help wildlife by removing and safely disposing of any and all fishing line left behind, wherever it may be.  The stuff is lethal.

If there is one phrase to sum up the week here, it would be “my BRAIN hurts!”  Webmaster Ron spent the week upgrading all aspects of the web page – a massive amount of intense, detailed code writing, layout and text editing and photograph uploads.  Since my computer screen shows the page slightly differently from his, we were both running back and forth between our offices sending up updates and viewing/comparing the results.  Just a few more pages and it’s done completely for a while.  I spent the week getting the TRAC Blog up and rolling, with testing and input from those hardy souls who’ve visited the site so far and called, e-mailed and posted tweaks.  My learning curve has been very steep all week, but hopefully I’ve got it pretty well set up at the moment.  The only thing I don’t like is that comments are currently being shown on the page from first to last, not from the most recently posted backwards.  It turns out that the problem is we are using an older version of the blogging program and in order to get the posts in better order our web hosting service needs to update the blog program from their server.  We’ve sent in our request and hopefully that will be taken care of shortly.

Bird Rehab Notes:  It’s been a fairly quiet week on the bird rehab front.  The barred owl that we got in at the end of last week was kept in intensive care all this week.  Further exam revealed the true cause of his inability to stand or grasp was lead poisoning by ingestion.  His treatment immediately changed to intramuscular injections every eight hours for five days of a very expensive drug called Calcium EDTA.  The drug binds to the molecules of lead in the body and renders the toxin harmless, allowing the patient to excrete it in the urates.  The injections themselves are painful, but the drug is very efficient. I am happy to report that the bird went from being unable to stand or eat to being able now to stand, perch, and eat on his own (without even having to have his food chopped up).  He graduated to being put into a much larger cage in the hospital’s Raptor Ward.  Now we feed him up, provide physical therapy and observe for a while to make sure that we got all the lead out and that he’s in full good physical condition.  Sometimes lead poisoning can mask other issues, so taking time is essential.

Ingesting lead is a not-uncommon issue with raptors.  Hunters sometimes shoot something and then leave it lying out in the woods or field, or sometimes they’ve killed a deer and cut the bullet out when they field-dress the deer and leave the bullet and the gut pile behind when they take their deer home.  In both cases, this leaves what looks like easy food to a predator (not just raptors!) and they happily consume away, ingesting the lead along with the carcass.  Another way that lead is ingested comes from eating waterfowl or bottom-dwelling fish that consume lead pellets as they eat aquatic plants or other fish that eat off the bottom of lakes and rivers.  In this case, the lead builds up slowly in the body of the waterfowl or fish, allowing them to consume much more of it over time than could be withstood in a single dose.  When the predator then eats the waterfowl or fish, the lead goes into the predator’s  digestive system all at once.  Sometimes it can take a few days for the effects to show, sometimes it’s more rapid.  Left untreated or if the toxin has had it’s way for too long, the predator will die of lead poisoning.  Over the years we’ve treated owls, bald eagles and hawks for the problem, with good results if we get the bird in time, bad results if we don’t.  What can be done?  If you are a hunter, switch to non-lead shot and bullets and always take all of what you shoot with you or bury it.  Don’t leave anything in the field for scavengers.  That said, there is so much lead in the environment now from shot and bullets left in and on the ground from previous hunting seasons over the centuries that we’ll be dealing with this issue for many, many decades to come.  TRAC is not anti-hunting in the least.  We believe that hunters play a vital role.  We just urge responsible behavior.

New Educational Ambassador:  This week we transferred a male merlin from our US Fish and Wildlife Service rehab permit to our permanent possession – education permit.  He was turned in on December 30, 2008 after being kept by a person for at least 6 weeks.  During that time, a veterinarian with no background in wild bird medical care attempted to pin the broken wing, with very poor results.  When the merlin finally came to us, the damage was done.  (This x-ray was taken that day.)  The pin was falling out, the fracture site was infected and the bone was badly misaligned, with bone fragments and splintered bone still in the wing.  Despite TRAC Staff Veterinarian Dr. Bill Streit’s best efforts, we were unable to reverse history and the bird cannot fly.  He is adjusting well to being handled as an educational bird now and we look forward to including him in programs very soon.  Since male merlins are called jacks in falconry lingo, we thought the name Jack was appropriate.  He has a good sense of humor and a very perky demeanor.  We published a species spotlight on merlins in our February 2009 newsletter.  Ron has published the newsletter to the TRAC webpage and the merlin write-up to the site’s species spotlights: www.tracwv.org/spotlite.html.

Volunteers:  This week two individuals picked jobs from the TRAC Website job jar.  BH will be joining us for an afternoon of on-site help on March 14, and TC has volunteered to do the data entry we need to upgrade our rehab patients database.  Thanks, guys!  If anyone else would like to volunteer there are plenty more jobs to go around.  Check out current listings in the job jar section of our website.  Just click on the icon on the site’s front page.

 That’s the news for this week.   Thanks for the comments and ideas, and keep ‘em coming – we’re listening!  Good birding to all.

-Wendy Perrone, TRAC Executive Director

Greetings, & update for the week ending 2-14-09
Filed under: Weekly Updates — Wendy Perrone @ 2:27 am

Hello! Thank you for joining our new Blog.  Please spread the word to your friends.  Here’s what’s been happening this past week:

Birds in: We received 5 patients this week: 2 pied billed grebes (which are kind of like small diving ducks with funny looking lobed toes, like in the picture on the left) were turned in after being grounded on a roadway and a warehouse roof by a storm early in the week. Their legs are placed too far back on their bodies to allow them to stand up on land so they were unable to get back up in the air. We fed them up with small fish over night, then released them into a nearby river. They dived immediately and swam around, then took off to the sky. A red shouldered hawk was hit by a vehicle and despite all our efforts died within 24 hours from internal injuries. A red tailed hawk female managed to hit herself on the side of a carport chasing prey. The owner of the carport gathered her up and got her to us. She is healing up from a concussion and in the meantime is enjoying free food and R & R. She should be able to go out again next week. At the end of the week we received a barred owl found on an ATV trail. Exam showed bruised pelvic nerves, and he is unable to stand a the moment. He is currently on medications and we think he’ll be ok in a few weeks. In the meantime he definitely is NOT happy about being captivity!

Birds out: Late this week we released a first year Coopers Hawk who had flown into a window several weeks ago chasing a bird. She had given herself a bad concussion and her legs were paralyzed for several days. She flew out Friday strong and fast, looking good. Saturday evening we returned a barred owl to his home after a month of care. He’d been hit by a truck on the interstate, and his rescuer was able to attend the release with us. The barred owl flew out into trees he obviously recognized and after a minute or two flew straight to a dead snag that had a big hollow in it that we’d not seen before. He definitely was home.

Education programs: On Friday we presented our “Wings of Wonder: WV Birds of Prey” program for Rupert Elementary School. 230 little kids were good as gold as we introduced them to 6 of our 14 education birds: Twister the barn owl, Hoolie the great horned owl, Ayla the American kestrel, Perry the peregrine falcon, Chip the broad winged hawk, and Spirit the golden eagle. The kids, teachers and parents were very enthusiastic and we got a lot of great questions.

Other issues: Some small songbirds called pine siskins have been dying from an unknown cause around the State, mostly during this week. We put together a flier telling folks of the issue and telling them how to clean and disinfect perches and feeders. We are working with birders, veterinarians, and wild bird rehabilitators and others to try to contain the problem. Indications are that the problem is also showing up in surrounding states.

Our quarterly newsletter “The Raptor Chapter” was mailed out on Monday and placed in pdf format on our website:www.tracwv.org/pdf-files/nl 0209.pdf    We also established TRAC as a  Facebook Cause to help broaden our outreach and to encourage people to care for wild birds in their areas.

We established a fund-raising goal on Facebookl of $500 by March 10. We have raised $100 towards that goal to date. We need help!

Well, that’s the update for this week. Please let me know if you like this, have ideas, questions, suggestions, etc.  I’d like to tailor these announcements to Blog members!  Keep in touch…

-Wendy Perrone
TRAC Executive Director