Feathered Raptors Forever

The new Indiana Raptor Center website is open for business.

I've written about Indiana Raptor Center several times over the years. They are a local (to me) hospital that rescues and rehabilitates orphaned and injured birds of prey, as well as performing educational programs to teach the public about the importance of raptors in the environment and conservation in general. Since last summer, I have been working on their new website along with my wife Jennie, who was instrumental in rethinking the site architecture and researching other sites in the wildlife rescue world. Now it's complete, and I'd like to invite you to check it out.

The center was in dire need of a new site, for many reasons. The new design is focused on two prime objectives: 1) make the site work well on mobile devices; and 2) make it really easy and obvious how to donate. InRC does work that is clearly in the public interest, but they receive no public money. On their old site, fundraising was almost an afterthought. I won't go on too long about the process of creating the site, since I talk about it a bit at the InRC blog.

The amount of work InRC does astounds me - as does their ability to weather the almost daily heartbreak that comes with the job. They're a totally volunteer organization. Since I know for a fact there's a considerable overlap between LITC readers and lovers of living dinosaurs, I hope you'll visit the site, share a link with our fellow bird lovers, and pitch a few dollars to them if you are able and inclined.

Taiga, a recently departed peregrine falcon who served as an education ambassador for years.

Indiana Raptor Center update

I've written here before about my occasional work with the Indiana Raptor Center, helping spread the word about conservation and rehabbing injured birds of prey so we can keep this proud branch of the dinosaur family going strong. There's been a bit of activity lately, so I figured I'd round it all up in this post.

Vulture Rescue Squad!

There's a vulture in there, honest!


This week, I visited the center to talk shop and hammer out some details about a couple of design projects, detailed below. As soon as I pulled in the driveway, they had a surprise for me: my first rescue trip. A nearby landowner had reported a turkey vulture with a broken wing. Center founders Patti Reynolds and Laura Edmonds weren't sure if it was a good ID; wild turkeys are sometimes confused for vultures. But we had to go check it out.

We bounced up and down the hills and dales of Brown County, and after several minutes were at the location. We found that the ID was good: it was a small Turkey Vulture, with an obvious wing injury. Volunteer and master taxidermist Marcus donned some heavy gloves, Patti grabbed a towel, and I took a large net, with my camera hanging from my neck. Forming one point of an enclosing triangle, it was my job to keep the vulture out of the road. Patti and Marcus approached from their points, and within five minutes of us pulling up, Marcus lunged, pinned the bird, and scooped him up. Patti wrapped him in her towel.



Luckily for the bird, he had managed to scrounge some nutrition. Luckily for us, it hadn't been too recently. The vulture tried to defensively vomit, but since he had an empty tank, we kept clean. After a chat with the homeowner about the bird's possibilities for rehab, we delivered him to the Raptor Center's facilities where Laura was ready to do an evaluation.





He had a pretty bad break right at his wrist joint (seeing vulture pus is marked off my bucket list), which Laura cleaned and wrapped. After hydrating him and feeding him raw beef dipped in gatorade, she gave gave him a shot of painkiller and returned him to his box for a much-needed nap. Next, he'll visit their veterinarian who will determine the chances for recovery, and his ultimate fate will be decided. If the wing can be healed, he'll eventually be released. If not, he'll have to be euthanized. Fingers crossed for a good prognosis.



UPDATE: Sadly, the bone was too far gone and the bird had to be euthanized. He is going to be mounted for a local nature center's educational programs. But I'll always remember him like so: a creature joyful to be fed fresh meat, whipping it back and forth in his beak and spraying us with gatorade. To a second life as a teacher of curious minds.

Conserving a Jurassic Legacy
I'm always excited to work in a new production medium, and when Laura recently asked me to think about a design for a patch depicting a Mesozoic dinosaur with an extant bird of prey, I was stoked to work on it. I recently submitted this design of Velociraptor and a Red-tailed Hawk, which everyone at the Raptor Center gave the thumbs up to... next step is production. I'll be talking to a manufacturer to find out if I need to tweak anything to make sure the small detail is preserved once it jumps from screen to thread. I cannot wait to get the embroidered final product. I'll snap some photos for sure.



Red-Tailed Hawk Conservation
We've had a rash of protected bird shootings in Indiana over the last several months. Luckily for our birds, Patti and Laura know that a method to combat this has been tried and proven in other states: simply, put birds in front of school children and get the population of outdoorsmen to pay attention. I'll be helping with both efforts, but first up I'll be doing a poster aimed at the latter group. I'm really excited that we've received permission to use one of William Zimmerman's Red-Tailed Hawk paintings! My task: to drive home the point that while a hawk will occasionally nab a chicken or two, your friendly neighborhood raptors save you thousands of dollars in the long run by eating up the rodents that covet your grain stores. I'll share this here as well.

Birds are dinosaurs, blah blah blah...

Extant Theropod Appreciation #9: Raptor Sunday

Patrick, an American Kestrel and stealer of hearts.

This past Sunday, Jennie and I visited the Indiana Raptor Center in Nashville, a small tourist town about a half hour from Bloomington and the IU campus. Situated on a ridge in Indiana woodland, backing up to a ravine, the Raptor Center is home to dozens of species, both local and exotic. The center's president and executive director, Patti Reynolds, along with education director and master falconer Laura Edmunds, showed us around the facilities and introduced us to some of the resident raptors. I think we made friends of both the feathered and non-feathered kind, and I hope that the sentiment is mutual.


Barred owl with something yummy.

I occasionally get bushwhacked by the beauty of an avian critter and do posts in the Extant Theropod Appreciation series. This week will certainly be in that vein as I share some of my feelings about the visit. I have never really interacted with raptors in this way, save for the odd presentation in grade school or nature centers. This was a whole different ball of wax: learning the animal's names and stories, seeing the relationship they had with their keepers and rehabilitators, dodging them as they flew inches above my head (an experience I commend Jennie for enduring). You look into the eyes of an owl or a falcon, and even though I'm as skeptical and non-spiritual as they come, you can understand how mythologies spring from these animals. You can understand why we might project human qualities onto them, and either aspire to the nobler ones or personify our fears.


Oliver the Peregrine Falcon, with a quail for lunch.


Mowgli, a female Great Horned Owl.

To me, though, you must set those poetic and mythic associations aside and focus on the inherent value of an animal. An owl is not wisdom. A bald eagle is not righteousness. They are instead integral parts of their habitats. There is a reason they live where they do: they are living components in ecosystems. Those ecosystems in turn have evolved to become the environments which first sustained our ancestors, and to alter that system is to impact our own lives in ways we can't always predict. The Indiana Raptor Center and related organizations don't just rehabilitate the broken and needy, they help us understand how we can correct broken environments and see just how needy we are.


Thunderin' Ben the Bald Eagle, making that distinctive Bald Eagle cry.

If you have a local raptor rescue center, I'd encourage you to see if tours are available and, if you're looking for some way to contribute, donate time, talent, or money. This was such a huge honor for me, and if you've also had little experience with these animals up close, you owe it to yourself to look them in the eyes, examine their plumage, and see them in flight up close. Thanks to Patti and Laura for being such obliging hosts (extra thanks to Laura for keeping me on my toes - when we first arrived, she said "So, you're here to see the... pickling operation?" and I, gullible dope that I am, fell for it, wondering if I'd come to the wrong address. Even after this, she pulled five or six more fast ones on me before I became more alert). I'll have one or two more posts about this visit, but you can also check out photos and a video in my Flickr set.

Extant Theropod Appreciation #8: Eagles

The Tawny Eagle, Aquila rapax. Another gem from Dan Ripplinger, from Flickr.

Look at an eagle and know: this bird means business. All birds "mean business," of course. But it's hard not to project human qualities onto this bird. The eyes seem to perfectly project a sense of determination and tenacity. It's such a striking feature that it inspired one of Jim Henson's most memorable creations. Sam the Eagle doesn't need to do anything and you've got a pretty solid idea of what he's like as a character.


Photo by Barry Johnson, via Flickr.

David Attenborough's Eagle: The Master of the Sky is one of many nature programs shared by BBCWorldwide's Youtube channel. It's one of his best. A sequence about Bald Eagles in Alaska is a particularly stunning portrayal of their social lives. As the gathered birds snatch dying salmon from a volcanically heated river, they vie with each other for the fish. It's a highly ritualized competition, far removed from the chaos one might think of when imagining predators competing for a kill.

This sequence is just the beginning; it's immediately followed by bits on the Crowned Eagle of Africa, picking monkeys out of trees, and a Golden Eagle in Greece who solves the problem of a tortoise's shell by carrying the poor creature high in the air and dropping it onto the rocks below. Two Black Eagles cooperate to hunt cagey rock hyraxes in Africa. African Fish-eagles harass flamingos until they're too exhausted to escape their talons. To watch the diversity of lifestyles and behaviors the eagles have adapted to as a genus, it's difficult to imagine why anyone would have ever consigned their saurian forbears to lives of bellicose drudgery. No doubt that the time-traveler visiting the Mesozoic would find that many of our most electric ideas about dinosaur behavior pale in comparison to the ways they truly interacted.

Extant Theropod Appreciation #7: The Mandarin Duck

When looking at the fantastic gallery of Robert Clark's photographs of feathers and their fossils at National Geographic, I was reminded of the most captivating plumage I've seen up close: that of the male Mandarin duck, Aix galericulata. Carl Zimmer's article on feather evolution, which Clark's photos accompany, understandably focuses on flight feathers, those exemplars of natural engineering. Last weekend, while pausing to enjoy the raucous waterfowl of Sarah P. Duke Gardens on the campus of Duke University, I watched a group of Mallards speeding through the air above the small lake they call home and marveled that birds so perfectly adapted for life in the water were also so swift and graceful in flight. Zimmer also discusses the idea that feathers may have first evolved for their peerless display abilities. In the Mandarin, we also see beautiful feathers evolved for display. particularly in that rich reddish mane and stark white mask. But as a duck, the Mandarin also sports plumage evolved for the needs of an animal who spends a lot of time in the water.

While in England visiting our friends Marci and Alasdair in 2008, we visited St. James's Park in London, populated by an array of birds including mute swans, coots, and moorhens. At the very east end of the park, just as we were about to cross to Horse Guards Parade, I saw the finest of them all. The Mandarin.

I don't think I've ever been so thrilled by a bird, and I'm sure that Jennie and Marci would attest to the glee with which I set about photographing it (Jennie in particular would probably provide an unflattering impersonation, which is one of her more wonderful habits). They're not the most accomplished photos in the world, but they're among my favorites that I've taken.







Confession time: At the time, I mistook the Mandarin for a Wood Duck, a species I'd been hoping to see ever since first gazing on its illustrated form in a bird guide when I was a child. They look nothing alike! I saw the Mandarin's elaborate coloration and assumed it was a Wood Duck. What folly!

Extant Theropod Appreciation #6: The Capuchinbird

You know what's hard to find? Good video of Perissocephalus tricolor, popularly known as the Capuchinbird. The best footage I've seen is in the "Signals and Songs" episode of David Attenborough's The Life of Birds, which I am rewatching on Netflix instant right now. One of the wildest sounds I've ever heard a bird make comes out of the Capuchinbird, a nasally, harsh, droning sound that explains its second nickname, the Calfbird (which is what Attenborough calls it in the series).

Here's one of the only videos available at Youtube.



I love this bird, a member of the South American tribe of passerines called cotingas; it's normally found in Guyana and Brazil. With its bald, pale blue head and tawny body, it's delightfully ugly, as if in open defiance against the most beautiful members of avian kind. In the Life of Birds footage, the bird's grotesqueness is even further amplified when its neck pouch inflates, stretching it to the point of translucence. That in itself isn't too odd, but the feathers of the Capuchinbird are arranged such that the front of the inflated pouch is completely covered, leaving only a small "window" on the side which can be seen through. Combined with the rest of its bizarre body and the otherworldly sound it makes, it's a striking effect that brings home the ability of nature to devise endless ways to startle and amuse.


Photo by Joao Quental, via flickr.

Extant Theropod Appreciation #4: The Wild Turkey

Photo by Ashok Khosla, via Flickr.

Yes, I've already declared my love for Meleagris gallopavo here. But in the USA, tomorrow is Thanksgiving, which is also known as "Turkey Day," so it's only fitting that I do so again. It is, as far as I know, the closest we come to a day honoring a bird. Heck, it's the closest we come to honoring any specific organism at all, with the exception of grandparents' day, mother's day and their ilk, which authorities agree are a bunch of bullshit Hallmark holidays. Not so for Turkey Day, which has a proper parade, special decorations, and traditional feast.

I used to think that Benjamin Franklin's endorsement of the turkey as the USA's national bird over the bald eagle was more legend than truth, but this is not the case. Indeed, he put it in writing.

...the turkey is in comparison a much more respectable bird, and withal a true original native of America. Eagles have been found in all countries, but the turkey was peculiar to ours; the first of the species seen in Europe being brought to France by the Jesuits from Canada, and served up at the wedding table of Charles the Ninth. He is, besides (though a little vain and silly, it is true, but not the worse emblem for that), a bird of courage, and would not hesitate to attack a grenadier of the British Guards who should presume to invade his farm-yard with a red coat on.

I agree. I mean, look at this face. What's not to love?


Photo by Kelly Burnham, via Flickr.

The turkey also played a larger role in the progress of technology than the bald eagle ever did, for Franklin's favorite bird was also one of his test subjects. To wit, letter from one of his colleagues to the Royal Society, excerpted from his Life and Writings:

He made first several experiments on fowls, and found, that two large thin glass jars gilt, holding each about six gallons, were sufficient, when fully charged, to kill common hens outright; but the turkeys, though thrown into violent convulsions, and then lying as dead for some minutes, would recover in less than a quarter of an hour. However, having added three other such to the former two, though not fully charged, he killed a turkey of about ten pounds weight, and believes that they would have killed a much larger. He conceited, as himself says, that the birds killed in this manner eat uncommonly tender.

So, for an "uncommonly tender" bird, skip the foolhardy deep-frying rig you've set up and electrocute it yourself.

Finally, here's a Norman Rockwell painting I photoshopped last year. Figured I'd roll it out again.

Extant Theropod Appreciation #3: The Black-capped Chickadee

I'll probably always associate the varied whistles, chirps, burbles, and especially the somewhat harsh "chick-a-dee-dee-dee" call of the Black-capped Chickadee with my current backyard: there's something about it that pairs perfectly with the white pines that loom over the other trees around the perimeter. While it's been one of my favorite birds since I was a kid with an old field guide and a few bird feeders, it's this setting that seems to be the small songbird's perfect stage.


Photo by Greg Wagner, via Flickr.

Theropods just don't get much cuter than this. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology's All About Birds site lists some pretty incredible facts about this common visitor to bird feeders, especially regarding their cunning little brains. Take this one:

The Black-capped Chickadee hides seeds and other food items to eat later. Each item is placed in a different spot and the chickadee can remember thousands of hiding places.

Or this one:

Every autumn Black-capped Chickadees allow brain neurons containing old information to die, replacing them with new neurons so they can adapt to changes in their social flocks and environment even with their tiny brains.

Pretty awesome, and there's more where that come from.

Extant Theropod Appreciation #2: The Gray Catbird

Photo by Kevin Morrison, via flickr. This bird stopped on a cruise ship while migrating over the Gulf of Mexico.

One day four or five years ago, my wife and I were doing one of our occasional landscaping projects on the meager scrap of land which was ours to work as condominium owners. It was an all-day project - building a small walkway of limestone that would make walking along the slope into the sinkhole behind the condo easier. As I built the retaining wall that held it up, a small gray songbird made a circuit between the roof of the condo, a small maple tree in the common area adjacent to the building, and spots unseen. Every so often it would stop at the roof, fly to the maple tree, sing or call, and fly away. I'd never seen it before, but I was surprised by how much it sounded like a Mockingbird, another bird I got to know since moving to southern Indiana. Its other call, a feline-sounding mew, helped me identify it as a Gray Catbird. While its range covers my hometown in northwest Indiana, I never saw one until moving south.

Since then, it's become my favorite local bird. The house we bought two years ago is blessed with a sheltered backyard bordered by silver and sugar maple, pine, sassafras, mulberry, dogwood, redbud, a hemlock, and a redcedar, making for a perfect hangout for catbirds, which have an affinity for mixed growth areas. A mimid like the mockingbird and the Brown Thrasher, the catbird is a gregarious visitor. Its coloration is beautiful in its simplicity: slate gray with a black cap and rufous bit under the tail.

If you're wondering just how canny its call's resemblance to a feline could be, close your eyes after clicking play on the video below.



Pretty good imitation, huh? Heck of a good bird.

Extant Theropod Appreciation #1: The Turkey Vulture

I've been meaning to feature birds more often here - as they are the living descendants of theropod dinosaurs - and I've decided to start a new series called Extant Theropod Appreciation. First up: one of my favorites, Cathartes aura. The Turkey Vulture.

Vultures get a bad rap. If I mention that I've paused in my travels to watch a couple of them eat a possum that lost a fight with the Michelin man, I get an odd look. If I express my favorable attitude to one taking up residence in my yard, I receive a shifty glance. They're gnarly, ugly, cowardly eaters of stinky carcasses, after all. Think of how they're portrayed in the media. In westerns, they're harbingers of doom, hanging back and waiting for the hero to slough off the burden of life so they can pick the flesh from his bones. In Looney Tunes cartoons, they're just dopey (and erroneously saddled with the name buzzard).


Photo by Mike Baird, via Flickr.

For me, there are few nobler winged beasts. They provide a vital service, ridding the environment of dead flesh, limiting the spread of disease. And for that task, they are finely honed: heads free of feathers that would get funky when shoved into the guts of bloated carrion; a keen sense of smell; a soaring flight that conserves energy while looking for a meal; and strongly acidic urine used to cool the legs and kill bacteria on them. Sure, you can list any animal's adaptations and hold them up as evidence of its virtue. But in the case of the Turkey Vulture, they also demonstrate that it's not merely "settling" for a diminished profession in comparison to the eagles and hawks we celebrate so often. Vultures are perfectly specialized for their role.

I'm so glad I'm not alone in this.