Rethinking. That’s what I’ve been doing lately. I first started working with birds back in college and have volunteered or worked with three different organizations and some very experienced supervisors. You can’t help but admire them for what they know and for being so successful. Now that I’m running my own program, however, I can’t help but rethink a bunch of stuff I’ve learned over the years.
Surprisingly, what I’m most thankful for in my career is working with parrots. It’s not because I like parrots more than raptors, not even close. Sorry parrot owners—it’s like being a dog person vs. a cat person, I’m a raptor person. The good thing about working with parrots is that I learned to analyze everything when a situation isn’t working.
My previous bosses had already tried lots of different things to solve problems by the time I began working for them so I never saw all the struggles. Now, however, I’m dealing with them first hand—and boy are these birds testing me. One of my most frustrating obstacles is with Hayabusa, the peregrine falcon. She keeps re-injuring her wrist. We get it all healed up and the feathers growing back in and suddenly, she has a new scab or bleeding wound! So… time to step back and analyze the situation.
I have never seen her pick at the area. There is nothing in her mew that she could be hitting it on. Therefore, my latest guess is that she is rubbing it against the wooden wall while on her window perch. Her window perch is a half circle (which is standard for falcons) attached to the wall, near her window. So one of my new plans is to give her a different perch that sits out away from the wall. I will try to get it installed for her today. My other plan for her is to allow her to be in the vulture’s large enclosure during the day. It’s been too cold for Suli to be outside so she’s not using it and it gets a LOT more sunshine. It also has a big swinging perch. I’ve put Haya in there a couple times and she seems to really like it! Fingers crossed that this will help out.
Stay tuned for updates.
