Handler Talks - Winter Hours - Now on weekends you can participate in  Handler Talks every Saturday and Sunday at 1 p.m., with an opportunity to talk with handlers and see birds on the glove. 

Volunteer Feature Sue Matyszak - Sue and her husband Guenther moved to Lane County early last year, so Guenther could finish up studies in alternative energy at Lane Community College.  Sue came to our 2004 Earth Day Open House and immediately signed on as a volunteer - and even took on coordinating food for our 2005 Open House!  An animal care shift leader and member of the education team, Sue has contributed almost 1000 hours in the 19 months she has been with us - over 50 hours a month!  Her background includes an Associates degree in Zookeeping; the completion of the two-day IWRC Basic Wildlife Rehabilitation Skills class; zoo, aquarium, wildlife rehabilitation (including marine mammal rescue), and environmental education experience. She is currently working part-time at the City of Eugene Spay & Neuter Clinic and is a state-licensed wildlife rehabilitator.

Sponsorships of education birds has been popular this year and we are very grateful!  Sponsors get a certificate with a photo of their bird, the bird’s natural and personal history, a family membership to Cascades Raptor Center for a year, which includes free admission and discounts in the gift shop, and a plaque acknowledging their support on their bird’s enclosure plus listing on our website. The birds get someone besides us knowing just how special they are, plus some sponsors bring treats for their bird, like crickets for the saw-whet owls or cat food for the corvids!  We love it and appreciate it very much!  Food for these magnificent birds is a huge portion of our costs, and sponsors help carry some of that burden.  If you might be interested in sponsoring one of our wonderful birds, click here for more information!

Staff - We are absolutely delighted and very grateful to The Ahrens Foundation for funding two part-time positions: a Volunteer Coordinator and Education Coordinator. For the former, we’ve hired Jean Daugherty, a five-year volunteer (who received recognition by United Way and the Register-Guard as June’s Volunteer of the Month for Lane County),

and Erica Broderick, with us for 3 years as a volunteer, for the latter.  They will also share the responsibilities of operations manager. Read more about them at www.eRaptors.org/staff.htm. 

Upper right is the famous Northern Spotted Owl. 

Welcome - Thank you for your interest in the Cascades Raptor Center and for your support.  This is our third e-Newsletter.   If you do not wish to receive this occasional e-mailing, please reply to this with Unsubscribe in the subject line.  For more information, visit the CRC web site at www.eRaptors.org.

Case Study: Osprey 05-113 - On August 9^th, 2005, we received a call from a concerned citizen that lives off  Camp Creek Road in Springfield.  She had found an osprey that was hanging out on the ground along the road and not flying.  One of our volunteers drove out to the site and was able to catch the flightless bird.  It was a young osprey that seemed to have left its nest a little too early.  In the nearby field there was a huge osprey nest on a telephone pole.  Some babies could be seen in the nest along with the parents flying overhead.

The volunteer brought the osprey back to the center so that we could do an exam and figure out whether the bird could be put back into the nest.  An uninjured young bird’s best chance is with its parents, who can teach it to hunt and give it a fighting chance.  This bird, however, was extremely thin, had a lot of external parasites, and its feathers had not completed growing in yet. Because of its low weight, we knew we had to fatten the bird up so it would have the energy to complete the feather growth process and have enough reserves to begin learning how to fish.

We immediately began tube feeding the young osprey a formula developed for emaciation cases.  It contains simple essential nutrients, easily digestible materials, and lots of fluids to hydrate the bird.  The day after coming to the center, the osprey was moving on to small fish.  It is often hard to get osprey to eat while in captivity, so it was great to see her readily taking these small fish.  We continued with the tube feedings for an additional day and the osprey began gaining weight.  After six days in our intensive care unit, the osprey had gained enough weight to become really restless and we were able to move her to one of our smaller flight cages.  The feathers were still not completely grown in and we knew if we tried to return her to the nest so close to fledging time, she would probably jump out again to get away from us - plus the attempt to put this one back might cause the other ones to fledge prematurely also.

At this point, we decided to wait until her feathers grew all the way in and hoped to return her to her nest site when her siblings started learning how to hunt so she could join them.  As August passed and we entered September, we carefully watched her feather progress and were keeping our ears out for word on the osprey family. 

September 11^th came and the osprey’s feathers were well in, she weighed a good amount, and was flying well in our 100' flight cage.  I called the finder for a report on the rest of the family.  They had left the nest and the finder had only been seeing them over the ridge by her house - but had seen them as recently as the day before.  She was confident we could release the young osprey there and she could learn to hunt with them.  My husband and I jumped into the car with the osprey in a box and drove to the Camp Creek Road site.  When we arrived, there were no ospreys to be seen near the nest or over the ridge.  I knew that the bird’s only chance depended on being around other ospreys to learn how to fish.

The finder suggested that we drive along a side road that goes by the McKenzie River.  We found a few nest platforms but didn’t see a single osprey.  On our drive back to the Eugene area, we drove by two other nest sites, one in Glenwood and the other in the Skinner’s Butte area.  Again, no osprey.  We had been driving for about 3 hours now looking for a suitable release site and the young osprey was getting pretty restless.  It was imperative that we find some osprey for her to model and learn her hunting skills before embarking on her migration south. 

Our last chance was Fern Ridge Reservoir, to the west of Eugene.  Because the Army Corp of Engineers is working on the dam, the only access to the lake required us to drive all the away around to the park on the far west side.  We pulled into the parking lot, walked down to the water, and began searching the skies for osprey.  Suddenly we both saw one at the same time.  I ran back to the car, grabbed the box containing the osprey and heavy leather gloves, ran back to the water line and got the osprey out.  We saw the osprey come back to make another attempt to catch a fish and I set the young osprey loose.  She flew beautifully out over the water.  It was an incredible feeling to release this bird that had arrived so thin that we were not sure she would survive and then to see her join another bird in perfect flight. --  Erica Broderick

Late Babies - Well, the Willamette Valley is experiencing a record explosion in the vole population, and it’s having an impact on predators!  For years, humans believed that the numbers of predators controlled the numbers of prey, but it’s actually the other way around.  The mild winter of 2004-05 and the wet spring apparently created ideal conditions for the voles to multiply... voles are rodents, with a blunter nose and shorter tail than most mice - but the same ability to reproduce and the same important role in the food chain. 

And with the high numbers of voles, the raptors (and probably the mammalian predators as well) are having large clutches, with many youngsters surviving and, in terms of barn owls, having more than one clutch.  We had 13 young barn owls come in during October!  Six from one nest that was located on a 2x4 between two walls - a space so small that four of them had badly irritated hock joints from sitting in their own droppings.  We were able to get two of them back to their parents, in a nest box that the Springfield Country Club immediately built and put up close to the place where the parents were entering the maintenance shop.  We also gave those adults one older youngster from a sawmill.

Then another five came in from a barn torn down at a site being developed for houses, that had no place left to put up a nest box... and we’ve put two of those in that Springfield Country Club box. And then another fledgling, covered with dirt and oil from the welding room of a manufacturing plant!  At the end of October, we have four inside, still working on their hock sores, and two out with our foster parent owls ... but we’re seriously thinking of slowly filtering them all, two at a time, into the Country Club box.  Barn owls can’t count, but we don’t want to overload the parents and jeopardize the survival of the babies.  If we don’t, we’ll probably have to over-winter them - and we’ll definitely be keeping at least three of them, plus an adult that just came in with a broken wing.

Speaking of over-wintering, it looks like we’re starting out with a few birds that’ll be with us for awhile.  A young turkey vulture (another late baby whose parents may have decided to leave on migration without him, as he couldn’t fly yet) came in so thin and loaded with parasites that his feathers are very ragged.  Because feathers have a blood supply as they are growing in, whatever is going on with the body affects the feathers and can cause weak spots in the vane and even all the way across the shaft - called ‘hunger traces,’ ‘stress marks,’ or just plain ‘feather checks.’  This bird is actually dropping feathers and because he was almost hard-pinned (i.e., feathers finished growing in) when he was left behind, the weak spots are very high on the feathers.  We need to find him some company, though! Also here for the winter are an immature red-tailed hawk, picked up by a rescuer who saw it hit by a semi-truck, who has only two tail feathers left and needs to grow those in before being able to hunt effectively, and an adult red-tail that was shot.  Right now we have these three together.

We’re placing a non-releasable barn owl (who came in as a fledgling with a broken wing and leg, both healed but not usable) with a nature center in New Jersey, and are working two sharp-shinned hawks (both collisions with windows) and a merlin (broken wing) through the physical therapy of larger and larger cages.  And we just got in a barred owl with a broken beak, and two hawks with ruptured crops! We do see crop ruptures periodically, when a bird with a very full crop hits a window or gets hit by a car - but only one every few years, in my personal experience. These two, a red-tailed hawk and a sharp-shinned hawk, both came in the same day, within minutes of each other.

Autumn is the time of trauma cases ... but I’m hoping the vole population stays high so we don’t see the typical winter starvation!

Speaking of costs of feeding the birds: Any help with the groceries would be much appreciated!  We feed mice, rats, chickens, quail, fish and rabbits - plus mealworms and crickets.  Whole, small animals are essential for these obligate carnivores - and variety helps to ensure good nutrition.  We are grateful for a $2500 grant from The Harris Foundation that enabled us to buy a rack of breeding cages for mice (we were going through about 1500 mice a month this summer with all our barn owl orphans!)  And we’ve got other applications ready to go out for help purchasing equipment to expand our ability to raise chickens (our least costly food - the birds typically get these young roosters three times a week), plus start a quail breeding operation.  We currently buy 200 quail every three weeks ... Together, this equipment could save us some $9000 a year on our food bill!  We’d welcome any help towards those purchases, too!

New Facility - Things are moving along, with the addition of Ray Dodson, an architect with WBGS here in Eugene, to our planning team.  Ray has put us together with two other WBGS staff members, one with expertise in sustainability and one in marketing, a possible contractor, and introduced us to an economist whose firm does feasibility studies for this kind of project.  We hope to have bids from two groups who do the research to determine the viability of the project: given its estimated construction costs, on-going expenses, estimated visitor numbers, gate receipts, educational programs, other income sources.  They’ll contact similar organizations around the country and factor in local economic issues and, we’re sure, come out with a positive prognosis!

Another group is putting together an estimate of what it would cost to do a feasibility study on raising the capital we need. This is also an important step as it helps us identify areas of concern to potential donors, and address them in strategic planning and in the actual campaign, and also helps us get a feel for levels of potential participation.  Having outside firms do these important studies adds credibility when we launch the capital campaign - it’s also something they do all the time and we’ve never done before, so it frees us up to continue the planning process (and running the day-to-day operations).  So in the meantime, we’ll be looking for a grant to fund these feasibility studies.. 

We spent about 3 hours with Ray last week going room by room, building by building, and all the cages, determining square footage and any special needs, as a preliminary plan on which to base a construction cost estimate.  My dream goal is to have us up and running on-site in time to entertain the thousands of visitors coming to Eugene for the pre-Olympic track trials in the summer of 2008... but there’s a lot that would have to happen first!

The holidays are coming!  If gift-giving is part of your holiday traditions, I hope you will consider doing some shopping with us.  Here are some suggestions...

We have just received a small supply of a numbered, limited edition art book: North American Endangered & Protected Species.  This is an over-size, leather-bound book with leather case, published in 1995, filled with original artwork of 80 species listed under CITES (the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora) - from raptors to whales to endangered orchids.  Originally planned as the first in a series of six, one for each continent, with net proceeds to go to funding wildlife law enforcement, this North American volume became the only one completed before the death of the publisher whose dream it was.  Originally priced at $500, we are selling them for $45 plus $25 for handling and shipping, if they are not picked up here.  With only 2500 published, this is truly a magnificent collectors’ item.

- Sponsorship of one of our education birds in the name of a loved one or friend. Adopting one of our education birds includes a year’s membership (and free admission to the center), information on that bird and its species, and acknowledgement on the bird’s enclosure.  This is a wonderful gift for someone who has everything, including a love of birds!  Adopting one of our glove-trained program birds includes a special one-on-one visit with the bird and its handler, by appointment. See http://www.eraptors.org/gowild.htm

- Gift Sponsorship of a Raptor Experience: an educational program with live birds, brought to a classroom or a field trip for a classroom coming to CRC.  See www.eraptors.org/education.html. You can pick your own classroom (e.g., your child’s or grandchild’s class) or you can donate the money directly to our ‘scholarship’ fund, which we make available to schools or groups like The Child Center who may not otherwise be able to offer this wonderful experience to their children.  Thank you for helping us bring an enriching experience to the children of Lane County!

- Stuffed animals, puppets, t-shirts or sweatshirts ... come check out our gift shop for great ideas that will benefit the birds and help you whittle down your gift list! 

We’ll also be getting a print newsletter out next month. 

May winter find you well and warm!

--Louise Shimmel