When I was in college my mother joined the Juneau Raptor Center (JRC) and I slowly began to accompany her as she cared for injured birds, eventually becoming a volunteer myself.  The Raptor Center is a non-profit organization dedicated to the rehabilitation and release of raptors and other wild birds and to the education of the public.  Only a handful of interested volunteers run the organization and care for all the birds.  Though birds of prey are the focus of the center, native birds of all kinds are cared for from tiny warblers to great blue herons.  Both my parents are members now, my father on the construction and board end of things and my mother more on the bird care end of things. 

I composed this page in the early years of my volunteering (around 2003) and haven't updated it much since.  Consequently, the stories below are some of the earliest from my experience at JRC.  I'd like to add more as time and energy allow about the birds I've helped train (Patch the great-horned owl and Monalisa the red-tailed hawk), and some of the other birds that stood out over the years.  Because of the number of mews around our houses (see below), my mother often winds up taking care of quite a few birds on her own and I try to assist her as much as I can (which is not nearly enough).  Today my main charge is Monalisa, "my" ed bird, who lives in my garage. 

Education birds
When raptors come in that heal but are considered non-releasable (permanently broken wings, loss of eyes, loss of talons, etc.), a few likely candidates are kept as education birds to spend the rest of their lives in captivity to assist in educating the public, occasionally appearing at schools and public functions.  US Fish and Wildlife issues the permits for non-releasable raptors and requires that most partake in at least twelve programs annually.  As of this update, the Raptor Center has two bald eagles (Justice is fist-trained for programs and Lady Baltimore (aka Spirit) spends the summers at the top of the tram on Mt. Roberts), a northern harrier (marsh) hawk named AJ who was electrocuted and lost two talons on each foot; Blueberry, an imprinted raven; Phil, a gyrfalcon from the Kuskokwim who can't grow flight feathers; Brutus, a red-tailed hawk missing an eye; and Monalisa, a dark (Harlan's) red-tailed hawk with a broken elbow.

AJ, northern harrier hawk

Kira, peregrine falcon
Tundra swan (the first rescue)
My first experience in JRC was assisting my parents on a rescue mission to capture a tundra swan that was unable to fly.  In December of 2000, a woman looking out over Gastineau Channel from her house noticed a flock of migratory swans, not an uncommon sight during migration.  As the swans flew away, one individual was left behind, flapping but apparently unable to get off the water.  Its right wing seemed broken and she called the Raptor Center.  A few days later on a bitter cold afternoon, my parents and I left Aurora Harbor in their river boat and scanned the surrounding shores for something white; as there was little snow on the ground the swan was not hard to find sitting on the beach grass of Douglas Island.  What followed was a frustrating chase; the swan stayed on land when the boat approached the beach and escaped back into water when we tried to catch her on shore.  Finally, my parents dropped me off on the beach to keep the swan in the water while they pursued her by boat.  The exhausted bird was soon captured in a net and transferred to a large kennel in their warm garage.  She frightened us by drooping her long neck while we held her.  Within minutes of being left alone, however, she held it up gracefully and seemed to generally improve.  A trip to the vet revealed that she had been shot (illegally) and two pellets were lodged near the wrist of her right wing.  The vet was able to remove one pellet and clean the wound, but the other was left intact lest removing it do more damage by digging around the base of her feathers.  The swan was held for recuperation at the the King residence on Sunny Point; she remained indoors for a few weeks before they let her into a fenced enclosure with a pond.  We debated whether to keep her in captivity until the spring migration brought the other tundra swans heading north again or whether to let her go as soon as she was able fly.  Perhaps it is just as well that we never had to make the decision--the swam apparently gained the ability to fly again several days after being let outside and disappeared from her enclosure.  We hope she met up with her mate and family somewhere far to the south.

Super
My parents picked up Super on the bike path near the Mendenhall Mall in late winter, 2001.  She was a poor, starving, immature bald eagle not even a year old with huge blistery sores the size of large marbles on her face and feet, a truly sorry sight.  She had avian pox, the bird equivalent of small pox, and would need to be kept in captivity six months before it would be safe to release her.  Though she gained strength over weeks of feedings her sores only slowly improved and there was some talk of euthanizing her lest she spread the disease to other birds--(there is still debate about whether this is possible once a bird has recovered).  My parents fought for her until she came to live in an 8' by 8' mew across from my front door.  One of the boats I worked on that summer stopped at the Gustavus dock several times a week where sport fishing boats cleaned their catches; while the rest of my crew bartered for extra halibut and crab I grabbed salmon heads, (a bald eagle delicacy), and roe and brought them home for Super.  She ate like a horse and recovered strength over the course of the summer and the small sores around her mouth and feet slowly diminished.

Super, immature bald eagle
By fall, however, Super still had a disturbingly large sore in front of her left eye which prevented her from seeing forward.  She also became increasingly agitated with human company and frustrated with the confinement of the mew.  We had a large mew, (10' by 20' by 13' tall), where AJ lived for about a month before he moved to another house.  When he left, Super moved in and was much more comfortable in a home better suited to her size and where she could fly from one end to the other.  The sore no longer troubled her vision, but we kept her in captivity for the cold winter months while food was scarce and daylight scarcer.  When the eulachon and the herring start running in May (2002) we released Super only a few days from her one year anniversary in captivity. My mother set her down on the beach at Outer Point and we watched as she flew a few feet above the ground to land on a stump in the distance.  Unwilling to leave it at that, we stayed around for a few minutes hoping that she would perch in a less vulnerable place. After fifteen minutes on her stump, she lifted straight into the air about thirty feet and flew down the beach beautifully right over all of our heads and landed in a hemlock tree.  She was still sitting there when we left.

Lucky
Super's mew was next occupied by an immature bald eagle named Lucky (or, by some, Cessna).  Originally brought to the Center in her first year, Lucky was hit by a car and quickly recovered.  Then, In the summer of 2002, a grounded eagle was reported near the Juneau Airport and was caught after living on the ground for as long as several weeks.  The band on her leg allowed us to identify her as the same same eagle from four years before; now she was in transition from immature to adult coloration with a dirty white head and tail, a few white speckles on the back of her neck, a beak that was half yellow and half gray and one yellow and one brown eye!  It was something else to have her gaze at you with those eyes.  This time Lucky apparently had the tip of her wing sheared off by an airplane propeller (hence the name Cessna).  Though she can fly about 20 feet horizontally she'll never be able to hunt again in the wild.  Lucky was eventually sent to an education facility down south.

Thud
Thud was a fierce looking western screech owl who might have been intimidating but for her short stature.  Standing six inches tall )plus an inch of ears) Thud was quite charming and rather large for a western screech owl.  Flying near Thane Road at night not far from the ruins of the AJ mine she had the misfortune to collide with the front of the Juneau Recovery van, making a sound which the driver suggested as her name.  Trained in first aid, the driver promptly picked up the stunned bird, wrapped her in blanket and put an oxygen mask over her face and called the Raptor Center.  My parents picked her up and placed her in a kennel at another volunteer's garage (the closest thing we have to a clinic), where she laid in a stupor.  Hope for her survival was slim as she laid motionless on her side, but within a few days she was standing.  While she had no bone damage, a few members believed she might have brain damage as she refused to perch and some believed she leaned to one side.  Once a week, my mother and I took turns picking her up while the other opened her beak and placed small pieces of mice inside, which Thud then readily swallowed.   

Jake
And then there was Jake, a feisty, immature glaucous-winged gull who was hit by a car while eating french fries.  The man responsible for the meal threw his coat over the stunned gull and called the Raptor Center.  Jake stayed at my parents' house and was cared for by my mother and I for several weeks, alternately endearing himself to us and making us very angry.  He was apparently unharmed except for a bad scrape on his leg and the fact that he refused to eat, a most unseagull-like characteristic.  Each day we cleaned and rebandaged his wound and struggled to get him to eat on his own.  A few days of fasting while being presented with the most appetizing array of foods we could think of (we even made a few french fries) failed to move him to eat, so we had to force-feed him.  Cubes of halibut was the only thing he would keep down for some time!  I would never have imagined that the throat of a bird could be so huge, expanding to at least twice the size of his head, (or so it seemed), while he regurgitated a crop full of warm slimy fish we'd just spent far too much time getting into him.  He was very frustrating.

Jake, immature glaucous-winged gull (bathing)
Over time, however, Jake began to eat more freely until we only had to place the corner of a piece of fish onto his tongue before he would swallow.  Unless we introduced a food other than fresh fish, Jake often didn't regurgitate his meal and we grew more adept at opening his mouth and encouraging him to swallow.  We soon discovered that Jake's favorite pastime was bathing so we provided him daily with a big tub of water.  Because his bathing efforts were so vigorous, we removed everything else from his kennel so it wouldn't become drenched.  When his leg healed sufficiently to release him my mother tried a new approach to Jake's eating problem.  She collected fresh seaweed from the beach and added pieces of jack salmon, putting a bowl of the mixture in his kennel to encourage him to rummage around as seagulls do and possibly eat what he found.  Amazingly, it worked.  He began to eat regularly on his own and so we hastened to release him.  On the appointed day, we found a large flock of gulls feeding on the flats beneath the bridge and decided to release him there.  When we opened his kennel, Jake emerged slowly, walked around for a few minutes, stretched his wings by flying straight up, and then pointed himself toward the water and flew down to the other gulls.  The last thing we saw Jake do before he blended in with the other gulls was bathe in the channel.