Bird Cams Around the World

Peregrine Falcons, Eagles, Kestrels, Ospreys, Owls and Much, Much More!!!
It is currently Tue Mar 19, 2024 6:04 am

All times are UTC - 5 hours [ DST ]




Post new topic Reply to topic  [ 132 posts ]  Go to page Previous  1 ... 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
Author Message
 Post subject: Re: WILDLIFE CONSERVATION AND REHABILITATION~2014-2017
PostPosted: Sat Sep 30, 2017 1:14 am 
Offline
User avatar

Joined: Sat Aug 01, 2009 6:02 pm
Posts: 31531
Location: st. albert alberta
how very cool GIgi :15heartbeat:

how did she do

_________________
each day is full of endless possibilities (bev)
Image


Top
 Profile E-mail  
 
 Post subject: Re: WILDLIFE CONSERVATION AND REHABILITATION~2014-2017
PostPosted: Sat Sep 30, 2017 9:11 am 
Offline
Moderator
User avatar

Joined: Wed Jul 29, 2009 9:53 pm
Posts: 11165
Location: Indianapolis
bev. wrote:
how very cool GIgi :15heartbeat:

how did she do
She is in their flight cage with minimal human contact. She had lost a little weight from release so I imagine her hunting skills need work and I am not sure how the rehabbers do that. We fed her LOTS for the short time she was with us, so she must have been not doing well after her original release.

_________________
"Always try to be a little kinder than is necessary."
~ J. M. Barrie


Top
 Profile E-mail  
 
 Post subject: Re: WILDLIFE CONSERVATION AND REHABILITATION~2014-2017
PostPosted: Sat Sep 30, 2017 9:36 am 
Offline
Global Moderator
User avatar

Joined: Sun Jul 26, 2009 7:54 pm
Posts: 20192
Location: Ohio-USA
Wow Gigi -how cool.
Same folks that have Challenger!!!

Challenger is a non-releasable bald eagle in the care of the non-profit American Eagle Foundation. He is
the first bald eagle in history trained to free fly into major sporting events during the national anthem.

_________________
ALL CREATURES GREAT AND SMALL, THE LORD GOD MADE THEM ALL

Image


Top
 Profile E-mail  
 
 Post subject: Re: WILDLIFE CONSERVATION AND REHABILITATION~2014-2017
PostPosted: Mon Oct 02, 2017 10:30 am 
Offline
Moderator
User avatar

Joined: Wed Jul 29, 2009 9:53 pm
Posts: 11165
Location: Indianapolis
Beth wrote:
Wow Gigi -how cool.
Same folks that have Challenger!!!

Challenger is a non-releasable bald eagle in the care of the non-profit American Eagle Foundation. He is
the first bald eagle in history trained to free fly into major sporting events during the national anthem.
:flirty: I knew that and have used Challenger as a reference when explaining P7's origins. I can hardly believe it, but there are people who are not familiar with Challenger!

_________________
"Always try to be a little kinder than is necessary."
~ J. M. Barrie


Top
 Profile E-mail  
 
 Post subject: Re: WILDLIFE CONSERVATION AND REHABILITATION~2014-2017
PostPosted: Sun Dec 10, 2017 11:04 pm 
Offline
Moderator
User avatar

Joined: Wed Jul 29, 2009 9:44 pm
Posts: 25870
Location: Milton, Pa.
Rehabbed Grand Forks peregrine lands permanent home in Winnipeg
GRAND FORKS, N.D.—A peregrine falcon hatched in 2016 atop the University of North Dakota water tower and named after Grand Forks birding authority Dave Lambeth has a new permanent home.
In Winnipeg.
More article here:

_________________
"The time to protect a species is while it is still common"
Rosalie Edge
Hawk Mountain Sanctuary Founder


Top
 Profile E-mail  
 
 Post subject: Re: WILDLIFE CONSERVATION AND REHABILITATION~2014-2018
PostPosted: Tue Jan 02, 2018 11:15 am 
Offline
Global Moderator
User avatar

Joined: Sun Jul 26, 2009 7:54 pm
Posts: 20192
Location: Ohio-USA
Very good article that Ed Clark -President and co-founder of the Wildlife Center of Virginia-
wrote to Dear Abby over the weekend.

Animal Advocate Says Waste Lures Wildlife Into Danger ...



_________________
ALL CREATURES GREAT AND SMALL, THE LORD GOD MADE THEM ALL

Image


Top
 Profile E-mail  
 
 Post subject: Re: WILDLIFE CONSERVATION AND REHABILITATION~2014-2018
PostPosted: Wed Jan 03, 2018 10:33 am 
Offline
Moderator
User avatar

Joined: Wed Jul 29, 2009 9:53 pm
Posts: 11165
Location: Indianapolis
Thanks, Beth. Still good advice after all these years!

_________________
"Always try to be a little kinder than is necessary."
~ J. M. Barrie


Top
 Profile E-mail  
 
 Post subject: Re: WILDLIFE CONSERVATION AND REHABILITATION~2014-2018
PostPosted: Sun Mar 24, 2019 8:26 pm 
Offline
Moderator
User avatar

Joined: Wed Jul 29, 2009 9:44 pm
Posts: 25870
Location: Milton, Pa.
Didn't know where to put this.
I thought this was a something nice to read
.
Requiem for a peregrine
One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds
—Aldo Leopold
by Tom Davis - Tuesday, Mar 19th, 2019

Early one evening toward the end of April, my English setter, Tina, and I were on the homeward leg of a long, leisurely walk. It was exactly one week since an apocalyptic "weather event" had crushed Green Bay beneath two feet of snow; my wife Joan and I had watched for hours, disbelieving, as the world beyond our windows went white. Now, while Spring seemed finally to have sprung—we'd been enjoying a run of sunny, seasonably warm days—snow still lay drifted against the northern exposures and windrowed dirtily along the curbs.

Tina and I had followed our usual route, a route that takes us to the north-flowing Fox River and the paved recreational trail that parallels its east bank. The Fox is a couple hundred yards wide at this point, and in the beveled light its surface, ruffled by a gentle southerly breeze, was a swirl of fiery orange and deep, enameled blue. A few walleye boats bobbed about, gilded by the low sun and somehow made eminent by that quality of illumination. Overhead wheeled squadrons of pelicans, ungainly yet elegant, their movements synchronized as precisely as watches.

We'd done our out-and-back on the trail and come to the only road we have to cross: Riverside Drive, a four-lane that's one of the main north-south arteries in this part of the city. Glancing left to check the southbound traffic, my eye was caught by a dark, roughly elliptical object lying on the sidewalk about 40 feet away. My heart sank: It was a bird, one that had clearly been struck by a vehicle and killed.


From the size and slate-gray coloration I assumed it was a Cooper's hawk. They're common in our suburban neighborhood—Joan and I see them frequently, hurtling through the airspace of our back yard like bolts of feathered lightning—and because their m.o. is to fly low they're at distressingly high risk

of getting clobbered by cars. This wouldn't be the first Cooper's to fall victim to the traffic on Riverside Drive; sadly, I'd found several such casualties over the years.

I wanted to be sure of the I.D., though, so I heeled up Tina to take a closer look…and within a few steps realized, to my horror, that my assumption was wrong. The bird wasn't a Cooper's hawk.

It was a peregrine falcon.

The bird was lying breast down, its torso canted slightly towards me and its head to my left. The instant I glimpsed the "ear flap" marking that is the peregrine's unmistakable signature, something shattered inside me. "Oh no!" I heard myself cry as I quickened my pace. "Oh no!"

Then, all doubt falling away as I stood above the lifeless form—its rapier wings folded forever, its great yellow talons clenched in fistlike claws of death—I sank to the sidewalk, cradled my head in my hands, and wept. If a passing motorist had been moved to call 911, his report might have been something like "There's a madman with a brown-spotted dog crying over a bird…."

The falcon's size told me it was a female, and knowing there was every chance she'd been on the nest and incubating eggs only plunged me deeper into an abyss of despair. It was altogether likely, in fact, that I'd seen this bird: For the past decade peregrines have nested on a certain bridge just a couple miles from my home, and they're liable to show up in that vicinity at any time of year. I couldn't begin to count the number of times I've seen them while crossing the bridge in my car—many dozens, at least—but the sight of one of these magnificent predators, whether scissoring the sky above the river or perched heraldically atop some feature of the built environment, never grows old. It never fails to thrill—especially for those of us of an age to remember when the sight of a peregrine falcon anywhere in the United States was a headline-worthy event.

When the Endangered Species Act was signed into law in 1973 (by Richard Nixon, lest anyone forget), it had been more than a decade since peregrine falcons had nested successfully east of the Mississippi River. The chief culprit was the class of pesticides headed by DDT, the toxic residue of which becomes increasingly concentrated in the tissues of affected species as it rises through the food chain. Biomagnification, this insidious process is called.

In apex predators like the peregrine (also the bald eagle), the concentration of DDT grew so high that it caused the females to lay eggs with tissue-thin shells—shells that invariably broke beneath the weight of the incubating adults. With no young being produced, the peregrine population was like a jet that had burned up all its fuel. The only possible outcome was to crash.

It might have burned, too, the story ending in ashes, were it not for the efforts of Dr. Tom Cade of Cornell University's Laboratory of Ornithology and the non-profit offshoot he established in 1970, The Peregrine Fund. Working with missionary zeal, Cade and his collaborators—Jim Weaver and Heinz Meng, most prominently, but there were many others—perfected a technique for breeding falcons in captivity and rearing the young under controlled conditions until they could be "hacked" (released) into the wild. The banning of DDT in 1972 and the subsequent passage of the Endangered Species Act had opened a path for the species' restoration, but it was the tireless work of Cade and his colleagues at The Peregrine Fund that pushed it across the finish line.

As a footnote to this history, it's important to remember that most of the birds used for the breeding program came from falconers. Indeed, had the falconry community not maintained this precious genetic pool while the species was declining in the wild, the already steep climb facing the peregrine's recovery would have been immeasurably steeper—if it had been surmountable at all.

In 1980, the first wild-hatched peregrine eyases (chicks) produced by captive-bred parents anywhere in the world pipped out of their shells in a nest at the Barnegat National Wildlife Refuge in New Jersey. Two other successful nests were documented in the East that year as well—the first in more than two decades.

From there, as befits this bird capable of exceeding 180 mph in a stoop (making it easily the fastest bird on the planet), the pace of the peregrine's recovery was dizzyingly swift. The game-changer was the discovery that the species thrives in urban environments, which among other attractions offer tall buildings with cliff-like ledges for nesting, abundant prey, a comparative lack of predators, and reliable thermal updrafts. In August, 1999, barely a quarter-century after the recovery program's inception, Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt announced that the peregrine falcon had been removed from the Endangered Species list.

It's a spectacular success story—but then, pretty much everything about the peregrine is spectacular. Throughout the course of human history, no bird, and perhaps no species, has captured and enthralled our imagination the way the peregrine has. The symbol and embodiment of all that is fierce and wild and free—the very name peregrine derives from the Latin for "wanderer"—it's an object of enduring wonder, near-idolatrous veneration and, as the classical bird of falconry, desire that can border on obsession.

As Roger Tory Peterson observed in one of the finest, most evocative passages he ever wrote, "Man has emerged from the shadows of antiquity with a peregrine on his wrist. Its dispassionate brown eyes…have been witness to the struggle for civilization, from the squalid tents on the steppes of Asia thousands of years ago to the marbled halls of European kings."

And yet, for all this shared history, there is something gloriously unknowable and unattainable about the peregrine. Its soul is an impenetrable mystery. The bird can be "manned," to use the language of falconry, but it cannot be possessed. A line from Leonard Cohen's hauntingly beautiful "Joan of Arc" comes to mind: I love your solitude, and I love your pride….

All of which helps explain why I responded so emotionally when I found the dead peregrine, why it was so desperately hard for me to come to terms with it. Of course a dead peregrine is not something you ever expect to find. It is a thing so unimaginably beyond the realm of common experience that it was as if I'd stumbled across the broken body of Icarus, fallen after flying too close to the sun.

There was the heartbreaking banality of it, too, this most lordly and iconic of birds reduced to mere roadkill, its seething life force extinguished in a random instant. What remained was an empty vessel, and I had no more inclination to examine it closely— beyond determining that she was, indeed, banded—than I'd had to linger over the body of the dog of mine, also a setter, that I'd found dead on the shoulder of a rural highway some 30 years before. I'd wrapped her in an old blanket, buried her, and grieved—both for what she'd been, and for what she would never have the chance to be.

I wasn't about to leave the peregrine where she lay, though—that would have been to dishonor her—and I felt an obligation, both moral and scientific, to report the band. So I picked her up by those huge yellow feet, saddened all over again to feel her solid weight and realize what that implied: that she'd been a skilled, successful huntress, a bird who would have provided well for her offspring and given them a genetic leg-up in the struggle for survival.

That's when, as if to prove the point, I noticed the female blue-winged teal lying dead a few feet away, half-hidden behind a ragged mound of snow. My God, I thought, shaking my head as the fateful chain of events became clear. The peregrine had been hunting the ponded fields a few miles east of town (the likeliest nearby place to find puddle ducks at this time of year), made a kill, and was carrying it back to her territory on the river when she got clipped, probably by a semi-trailer, as she crossed the four-lane from east-to-west. The impact separated her from the teal; their momentum carried them both, dead in the air, to where they finally fell.

I could see it all too vividly in my mind's eye. F**k….

Was she flying just a fraction lower than normal because of the weight of the duck and the length of the flight? I ran this scenario past a falconer-friend a few days later and he found it persuasive, especially in light of the information provided when I went online to report the band: that she'd been banded as a nestling two years earlier at the Milwaukee County power plant in Wauwatosa, one of Milwaukee's western suburbs.

"An urban peregrine that's lived to be two years old," my friend opined, "has learned how to avoid traffic."

There's no way to know, of course, but if this explanation is correct what killed the peregrine, ultimately, was the very prowess, even genius, that defined her. The Aeschylean irony of that is almost too terrible to contemplate…and yet, as I sought to make some sense of the bird's death, it occurred to me that it was a tragedy made possible by triumph. Forty years ago the peregrine was on the Endangered Species list; today it's more abundant in the eastern United States than it's ever been, and the epicenters of that abundance are urban areas. Cities, in other words, even cities as modest on their faces as Green Bay, which boasts no fewer than four active breeding territories. For the peregrine falcon, the good old days are now.

It doesn't redeem the life of the one I found dead, but it helps salve the wound made by her loss.

Epilogue: The peregrine I recovered was transferred to the Richter Museum of Natural History at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, where it was preserved for science as a study skin. Experts I spoke to at the time assured me it was a virtual certainty that the vacancy created by the loss of the bird I found would eventually be filled, and I'm happy to report that they were correct. As I write this in March of 2019, a new breeding pair has occupied her former territory. Nature indeed abhors a vacuum.

_________________
"The time to protect a species is while it is still common"
Rosalie Edge
Hawk Mountain Sanctuary Founder


Top
 Profile E-mail  
 
 Post subject: Re: WILDLIFE CONSERVATION AND REHABILITATION~2014-2018
PostPosted: Mon Mar 25, 2019 5:19 pm 
Offline
Moderator
User avatar

Joined: Wed Jul 29, 2009 9:53 pm
Posts: 11165
Location: Indianapolis
Interesting, KF. Pulliam is only about 7 miles from University of Wisconsin Green Bay...

Image

_________________
"Always try to be a little kinder than is necessary."
~ J. M. Barrie


Top
 Profile E-mail  
 
 Post subject: Re: WILDLIFE CONSERVATION AND REHABILITATION~2014-2019
PostPosted: Tue Apr 30, 2019 11:10 am 
Offline
Moderator
User avatar

Joined: Wed Jul 29, 2009 9:53 pm
Posts: 11165
Location: Indianapolis
Yesterday I traveled to Terre Haute to pick up this Barred owlet to be raised by Bobbie, our surrogate. Bobbie was ready! She plucked out her feathers for her brood patch in anticipation although this youngster doesn't need brooding...
:flirty:
Image

_________________
"Always try to be a little kinder than is necessary."
~ J. M. Barrie


Top
 Profile E-mail  
 
 Post subject: Re: WILDLIFE CONSERVATION AND REHABILITATION~2014-2019
PostPosted: Mon May 13, 2019 12:01 pm 
Offline
Moderator
User avatar

Joined: Wed Jul 29, 2009 9:44 pm
Posts: 25870
Location: Milton, Pa.
Sheikh Zayed Falcon Release Programme releases 65 falcons in Kazakhstan
Pictures and article here:


_________________
"The time to protect a species is while it is still common"
Rosalie Edge
Hawk Mountain Sanctuary Founder


Top
 Profile E-mail  
 
 Post subject: Re: WILDLIFE CONSERVATION AND REHABILITATION~2014-2023
PostPosted: Wed Nov 23, 2022 3:04 pm 
Offline
Moderator
User avatar

Joined: Wed Jul 29, 2009 9:53 pm
Posts: 11165
Location: Indianapolis
Hey Betty!
:15heartbeat:
Image
A beautiful name for a beautiful bear:
meet Betty White!
Nearly half voted to name X33570 after the late Betty White,
a beloved actress and champion of important animal causes.

Bookmark the Polar Bears International Polar Bear Tracker
https://polarbearsinternational.org/polar-bear-tracker
to follow Betty's journey across the arctic sea ice.
We hope she has a fabulous seasonal hunt and offers interesting data that helps secure the future of her species.

"Everybody needs a passion. That's what keeps life interesting.
If you live without passion, you can go through life without leaving any footprints."

—From Betty White's book, If You Ask Me (And Of Course You Won’t)

The explore.org Team

NEVER STOP LEARNING

_________________
"Always try to be a little kinder than is necessary."
~ J. M. Barrie


Top
 Profile E-mail  
 
Display posts from previous:  Sort by  
Post new topic Reply to topic  [ 132 posts ]  Go to page Previous  1 ... 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

All times are UTC - 5 hours [ DST ]


Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 1 guest


You cannot post new topics in this forum
You cannot reply to topics in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum
You cannot delete your posts in this forum

Jump to:  
Powered by phpBB © 2000, 2002, 2005, 2007 phpBB Group
Translated by Xaphos © 2007, 2008, 2009 phpBB.fr