The Old and the New

For months, Laurel had been asking me to help her do this, but I just seemed to keep procrastinating.  Finally, we agreed on a day that she, I and Karen all had free, and as I sat there doing it, I understood why I had subconsciously been putting it off.  It was somewhat physically demanding, but its emotional toll was even more so.

It was a pretty day, sunny and in the upper 70’s.  The three of us were at Laurel & Eric’s house to “harvest” feathers.  The theory behind it is simple, with a procedure called “imping,” which you can Google to find out more about, if interested. You can also check out:  www.themodernapprentice.com/feathers.htm.

Doing this requires feathers that have been “harvested” from another bird, so that they can be released back into the wild as complete as possible.  As long as we have the same feather from the same kind of bird, we can splice and super-glue the two pieces together, and won’t ever have to release a bird with broken feathers again.  The most important ones are the flight feathers and tail feathers, which are crucial to a bird being able to fly balanced. 

Without repairing or replacing feathers, we would have to keep a bird in captivity until it grew a new feather to replace the old one, which may take months in some cases.  Not an ideal situation when you are trying to get a raptor back into the wild as quickly as possible.  Raptors usually tend to molt twice a year, and if a feather is broken right after it has been molted and re-grown, it could be 6 months or more before the next molt, when that feather will be replaced.  That’s a major problem for an animal that relies on its wings to survive.  Interestingly, when a bird is molting, it will molt a feather from one wing, and the next day molt the same feather from the other wing, so that it’s always balanced.

Each wing has 10 primary and 13 secondary feathers, so you have to make sure you get the same feather position for replacement.  For instance, if primary #2 on the left wing was broken, you’d need primary #2 from the left wing of the same species of hawk to replace it.  So, because we have birds that we are unable to save (unfortunately), we have access to feathers that we can use which might help another bird be able to get back into the wild right away.

We set up the table outside on their patio, under their beautiful cedar trees, along with scissors, pliers, cardboard, tape and markers.  Laurel disappeared for a few minutes, reappearing from around the garage with an armload of plastic bags which, upon further inspection, contained the bodies of some of the birds that didn’t make it, which had been stored in their outside freezer.

We proceeded to get the first bird out and cut the wings off, deciding to leave the feathers intact on the wing, which would make it easier to store and to harvest when we needed to.  I set about the task, trying not to think too much about what I was doing.  Laurel warned me that the tail feathers didn’t come out easily, and she was right.  Those took all my strength to pull out, one-by-one, with pliers.

The wings were then taped to a piece of cardboard, along with the tail feathers carefully kept in the right order.  The cardboard was marked as to what kind of bird the feathers were from, the sex (if known), and the medical case number, which we give to every raptor that comes to us.  Some of these birds I remembered from when we first got them, which didn’t make it any easier emotionally.  The cardboard, with feathers, was then put into a large zip lock baggie, and returned to the freezer.  The rest of the bird will later be burned, which is what we are legally required to do.

The wing and tail feathers of these birds were perfect and incredibly beautiful, and even though we chatted to keep our minds off what we were doing, after about the 5^th or 6^th bird, all of a sudden I found myself absentmindedly stroking the head of a beautiful red-shouldered hawk that I had just pulled out of the bag to work on.  Laurel looked at me and said “You’ve had enough, haven’t you?”  I looked at her and, on the verge of tears, said “yes,” suddenly feeling very overwhelmed.  She then said she had experienced the same exact thing when she was doing this by herself one rainy day a few weeks earlier.  Unfortunately, she didn’t stop when she got to that point, and after doing 3 more birds, found herself standing in the rain, in her driveway, crying.  So, we stopped right then, and cleaned things up.  Hopefully we’ll be able to put some of these beautiful feathers to good use in the future. .  Now, when we have injured raptors missing feathers, the feathers we have been harvesting will fly once more.

Going inside the house, we were able to lift our spirits by checking on two of the most recent babies in our care – a fledgling American kestrel and a fledgling Western screech owl.  What adorable little ferocious raptors they are.  Once they are fully fledged, they will be released in the areas where they were found. 

It helped my heart to see these new little ones, full of promise and the ferocity of life, after what we had just finished doing.  As we put the old behind us, we focus on the new.