The Glen Helen Raptor Center’s mission is to improve the welfare of raptors across Ohio through educating the public about birds of prey, wildlife, and conservation, and through the rehabilitation of injured raptors across Southwestern Ohio. Link
While there, I have helped with rehabilitation, clinic, releases, cleaning, feeding both education ambassadors and rehab birds, as well as educational programs. I have helped with the rehabilitation of many different birds, from little American Kestrels to a Barred Owl and Red-Tailed Hawks. I have learned how to interact with Bald Eagles, they are much more skittish than you realize or would think, and how to properly hold a bird to keep them and myself safe as well as a co-worker who is helping aid the bird. I have learned how to hold birds who are trained to sit on glove for educational purposes and how to get them back on glove when they try to fly away (even the birds that know they can’t fly still try sometimes).
I have gotten the chance to get to know birds that have huge personalities with their own likes and dislikes. Such as one of our education ambassadors, Daisy Duck, who is a Barn Owl who has a condition that makes her bones weaker and too easy to break for her to live in the wild. She also loves to explore inside when we let her. I have also helped attempt to catch a reportedly injured Black Vulture, which we determined to be doing alright because when we were trying to catch them, the vulture was running, and flying alright just not soaring. While on the way there, the volunteer that I was going with told me that vultures, both turkey and black vultures, tend to still run from you even when you get a towel over its eyes despite it not being able to see, so I should be ready for that.
Above is Daisy Duck (Ducky) who is a new addition to the Raptor Center’s ambassador team.
The day after Valentine’s Day, we had an event where visitors could make crafts both for themselves and enrichment for our crow ambassador, take photos with some of our educational birds, as well as buy animal hearts to feed to some of our educational birds. Then we got into the center in the morning to sheets of ice and a rainstorm. We decided that we should cancel that day’s event and move it to another weekend, we posted that it was moved and that people could still buy hearts online and we can video the birds eating them and send them out, but around 1pm a bunch of people still showed up for the event. We condensed what we could inside and still held some things that needed to be outside. The weather lightened up and I think it was a success.
Above is Will, who is an educational ambassador and is in retirement, meaning that he no longer goes out to programs. This is due to him having sever hip pain while being held on glove because of an old injury. He is currently being trained to use a scale and get into his box on his own so that we can monitor his health with out causing too much stress.
