Out With the Old, In With the New

Well, here it is, the last one from the migration season 2008-2009. This cooper's hawk became an extended case for us due to a highly contagious protozoan infection which resulted in a lengthy stay in isolation in a small hospital cage. Due to the high strung personality of this type of hawk, she broke most of her flight feathers, rendering her unreleasable. It is a challenge to manage these types of cases because the longer they stay in captivity, the greater the odds that they will sustain even more injuries that may render them unreleasable. This extended stay in captivity that results in a release is an especially big reason to celebrate. Those that know and work with cooper's hawks can appreciate this on a deeply personal level. So while the reader

may shrug and say oh, another cooper's hawk release, we celebrate each victory as each one of these feisty warriors is truly a challenge and a beauty to behold!

The 2009-2010 migration finally brought us our first peregrine. He sustained a fracture to his left wing and has a really good prognosis. We will remove his bandage this weekend and allow him to move the wing a bit so as not to cause any stiffness or retraction of tendons. We are considering ourselves extremely fortunate as he is quite calm and we anticipate that we should see him out of our center sometime in November.

The weather has been quite hot this year averaging in the upper 80s to low 90s every day. Too hot for fall, and too hot I think for migrating birds. The turkey vultures have arrived but the rest are slow to come south, or maybe just avoided us altogether?

Bird Profile- Brother the Peregrine

Since we are in anticipation of the impending yearly fall migration, I thought I'd share a photo of our resident peregrine falcon Brother who resides at the Miami Science Museum's Falcon Batchelor Bird of Prey Center. As evidenced by the photo above, Brother suffers from a prior injury to his left wing rendering him unable to be released back into the wild.

Every year peregrine falcons make the annual journey from their spring/summer homes in the Arctic tundra of Canada down into South America. These amazing migratory routes bring them straight down through the heart of downtown Miami. While it may seem strange, peregrines are frequently seen in the heart of many downtown areas of Atlanta, Philadelphia, Chicago, and multiple other locales across the country.

An interesting blog to follow can be found here http://frgroup.frg.org/2009/09/2009-southern-cross-peregrine-migration.html. The Southern Cross peregrine project actively monitors migrating falcons every year giving enthusiasts such as myself a day by day snapshot into how much ground these birds cover in a day and what I find most interesting: how some birds will follow the same routes year after year which follow one route down and another back, completing a full circle almost.

Brother was one of those typical first year falcons that did not complete his journey as many first year fledglings do not. It is an estimate that 75% of our peregrine patients are 1st year raptors. The migration is a perilous journey and one can only imagine how many near misses and perils are faced by the time these birds make it to Miami.

Hopefully this year will be a good one and we will return them all back to their journey. In the meantime, I sit with Brother and we both look up awaiting their arrival.