Right here in the Twin Cities, we have one of the premiere rehabilitation clinics for birds of prey! Join us for a conversation with Gail Buhl from the Raptor Center to talk all about how these feathered friends interact with the human-built environment.
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Attributions
Our theme song is Tanz den Dobberstein, and our interstitial song is Puck’s Blues. Both tracks used by permission of their creator, Erik Brandt. Find out more about his band, The Urban Hillbilly Quartet, on their website.
This episode was produced by Stina Neel, edited, by Jeremy Winter, and transcribed by Ian R Buck. We’re always looking to feature new voices on the show, so if you have ideas for future episodes, drop us a line at [email protected].
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Transcript
[00:00:02] Ian: Welcome to the Streets.mn podcast, the show where we highlight how transportation and land use can make our communities better places. Coming to you from beautiful, uptown Minneapolis, Minnesota, I am your host, Ian R. Buck. At long last, we have another episode about urban wildlife. Producer Stina Neel connected with the Raptor Center to bring us a conversation about birds of prey and how they interact with human-built environments. Let’s jump in.
[00:00:32] Stina: Hi, Gail. Could you start us off if you could introduce yourself and what you do?
[00:00:39] Gail: Yeah, my name is Gail Buhl, and I am the partnership coordinator at the Raptor Center for an initiative called Partners for Wildlife, and that’s what I do.
[00:00:49] Stina: So first, what is the Raptor Center?
[00:00:52] Gail: Ooh, the Raptor Center. I’ll tell you where it’s located first. We are on the St. Paul campus at the University of Minnesota, and we are part of the College of Veterinary Medicine. We were started way back in 1974, so we’ve been around for over 50 years, but we were started by faculty veterinarians at the College of Veterinary Medicine. So we do primarily three different things. We are a hospital for injured and orphaned raptors, and I’ll tell you what raptors are in a second. So that’s a lot of what we do, but we also do a lot of education and outreach, conservation outreach, and we have a lot of ambassador raptors that we use, so these are birds that cannot be released back to the wild, that we use for educational ambassadors. And we also do a lot of teaching, and most of that teaching is in our hospital with other veterinary professionals, veterinary professionals from around the world, but especially here in the U.S. is what we do. So raptors is kind of a not a catch-all term, but it’s not really a scientific term. But what it means is that there’s a group of birds that are generally called raptors, and they’re called raptors because they share some characteristics. And one of the main characteristics they share is they catch their food with their feet. The other characteristic that’s really important with catching your food with your feet is that you’re eating other animals. You’re not eating berries. You’re not eating vegetation. You are just eating other animals. You also need a hooked beak, comes to a point, and really good eyesight. So those four things really help make you a raptor. Now, there are a few birds out there. Well, one group of birds in particular that someone may say, well, how does that work with a vulture? Vultures don’t grab their food at their feet. They are eating animals that are already dead. So they’re scavengers and their feet aren’t particularly strong. And for a very long time, people actually associated vultures closer, being related more to storks or cranes. But DNA analysis over the last 10 or 15 years has definitely showed that they are much closer related to raptors than they are to other groups of animals. So they are grouped with raptors. Now, if you look in your bird book, if you’re a bird watcher, you will notice that hawks and falcons and eagles, and even vultures are kind of in one area of the bird book. But owls are not, owls are in a different part of the bird book. And that is because they’re actually not closely related to the other raptors at all. They’re more closely related to, I love saying this because it really perks up people’s ears. They are more closely related to the goat sucker family of birds. Doesn’t that sound great?
[00:03:47] Stina: Who else is in the goat sucker family of birds?
[00:03:51] Gail: Why, thank you for asking. They are your night hawks and your night jars and your whippoorwills. And the reason they’re called goat suckers is way back when farmers thought that these birds, that the night jars, the night hawks and whippoorwills, because they start flying at dusk and partially in the night, that they have very, very large mouths and they would come down and take milk from female goats. It’s not true at all, but that’s how the whole family got the name goat sucker.
[00:04:25] Stina: Oh, that’s fun. I love that.
[00:04:27] Gail: Isn’t it great? But owls are more closely related to them than they are to other raptors. So raptors again are not, is not a scientific term, but it is a convenient way to kind of group these animals together because they have a lot of similarities.
[00:04:41] Stina: And what about the term birds of prey? Is that still used? Is that a little different?
[00:04:48] Gail: No, it certainly is still used. And birds of prey are the same thing. The eagles, the hawks, the owls, the falcons and the vultures too. Generally people are not including vultures when they say birds of prey, but a lot of the hawks and the eagles and the owls will scavenge animals that are already dead as well as catching live prey. But birds of prey is just referring to those same group of birds.
[00:05:16] Stina: So how did you get involved with the Raptor Center? Were you interested? Were you a birder first?
[00:05:23] Gail: No, I loved all animals. I wanted to be a veterinarian. And when I started going to school at the university, I knew that I needed to get experience with veterinarians and kind of figuring out if this is something that I really wanted to do. Well, on campus, I really loved the St. Paul campus and it was close to the College of Veterinary Medicine too. So as soon as I could, I got all of my classes there and one class in particular called the biology colloquium. I would totally, if anybody attends the University of Minnesota and is in the College of Biological Sciences, I am plugging the colloquium. It’s a once a week class or it used to be a once a week class. And one of those weeks was in a big seminar and someone would come and talk about some area in biology. The other week we would have small groups and we would go to different places to see biology in action. And one of the places we went to was the Raptor Center. And I found out you could actually volunteer and you could work with veterinarians right there and work with wildlife. And I was very interested again in all animals, but particularly in wildlife, so I started volunteering and that was way back in the 80s. So I volunteered for the Raptor Center for about 15 years and I did everything I possibly could do. I didn’t learn everything, of course, but I helped with food prep. I helped with handling birds. I helped exercise birds. I handled birds for the veterinarians so they could do their exams or whatever needed to be done. And then after those 15 years, I was starting to work. I was, you know, out in the workforce and I was doing work with birds. I worked for a lot of different organizations, including the bird show at the Minnesota Zoo, and I still did a lot of volunteer work. I met my husband during that time and we ended up moving to Northern Minnesota. So then I couldn’t volunteer directly with the Raptor Center, but certainly I was still connected very closely with the Raptor Center. And I got my own wildlife rehabilitation permits at that time. And so, in Northern Minnesota, a lot of the animals that I got in as a wildlife rehabilitator were raptors. And so I would, with all of the training that I’d gotten through the Raptor Center, but also through wildlife rehabilitation conferences and continuing education, I could do, and working with my veterinarian, I could do triage on these animals, get them bandaged, stabilized, and then I could move them, transport them down to the Raptor Center. But the job that I had and all the professional jobs I had up until that point were in education and ambassador animals, so conservation education, and I learned how to be a naturalist when I worked for Wolf Ridge Environmental Learning Center in Northern Minnesota, plus the bird show at the Minnesota Zoo. I worked for Carpenter Nature Center. So I worked for a lot of facilities in Minnesota. And in 2007, there was a new executive director at the Raptor Center. And they were in need of somebody in charge of their education program. And I applied, interviewed, and got the position. And so I have been at the Raptor Center since 2007, and have never looked back. It was the only reason we moved back down from Northern Minnesota was the Raptor Center and my connections there. And then I was in charge of the ambassador animal program from 2007 to 2018. 2018, then I made a move to this, a new initiative called Partners for Wildlife, which is about working with wildlife rehabilitators in a seven state region, not just Raptor rehabilitators, but all wildlife rehabilitators. And I am an equal opportunity rehabilitator, so I taking all types of animals in my rehabilitation work that I do. So I’ve been doing that ever since.
[00:09:20] Stina: Nice. So I was looking on the website. We have so many Raptors in Minnesota. I knew we had a lot of owls. And I don’t know when I became a bird nerd. I think it was officially in 2020 is when I was like, I’m really into bird watching because it was a great time to be outdoors all the time by yourself.
[00:09:40] Gail: All the time.
[00:09:42] Stina: So, Ian, I thought it’d be fun to challenge you with if you could, could you name a couple of Raptors?
[00:09:48] Ian: Some Raptors that we have here in the Twin Cities?
[00:09:50] Stina: Yes, specifically in urban environments.
[00:09:53] Ian: Well, I know that there are a couple of bald eagles that have that. We’ve got the eagle cam in on the river in St. Paul. Yep.
[00:10:03] Gail: The Minnesota DNR has an eagle cam. They also have a peregrine falcon cam, which are really good. They’re both very, very good. Huge plug-in for Minnesota DNR.
[00:10:13] Stina: I didn’t know there were two of them. I saw I was watching the live stream. When I work from home, my third monitor is just like a live cam of some sort of it’s either underwater or it’s birds or something. Like it’s always an outdoorsy live cam because my my direct window view is not it’s a construction site. Not great for wildlife.
[00:10:36] Ian: Right. Well, I got to give a shout out to my neighbors. The Cooper’s hawks right outside my window. And this is the time of year when they come back. I haven’t heard them in a while. And then, you know, a few weeks ago, I started hearing their calls again.
[00:10:50] Gail: So they’re calling because they’re starting to set up territory. This has been a relatively mild winter. And so we’ve had Cooper’s hawks all over our neighborhood all winter long. If the food is around and for a Cooper’s hawk, the food is mainly other birds, small birds, especially songbirds. They also like chipmunks. So chipmunks, of course, during the wintertime are underground. They’re, you know, hibernating or at least sleeping most of the time. And now they’re just starting to show up again above ground. But a lot of the birds are small songbirds are coming back. So we’re going to get a plethora of migrants. And the urban environment for Cooper’s hawks is perfect because they love open woodland. And if you think of a lot of especially our older suburbs, we have a lot of open woodland. We have mature trees. Of course, it’s grass and shrubs or plants underneath. And that’s perfect for birds like Cooper’s hawks. And, of course, a lot of us feed birds. And that is an attractant to Cooper’s hawks. Now, some people are like, “oh, no, I don’t want I don’t want a Cooper’s hawk eating, quote unquote, my birds.” And if it is really a challenge for you, then my suggestion is is pull the bird feeders in for a few weeks and then put them back out again. But songbirds have their own defenses for Cooper’s hawks. And I’ve seen this in action, actually, just a couple of days ago, because we had a Cooper’s hawk in our yard and we feed the birds. We’ve got all kinds of bird feeders, ground feeders, tree feeders, all kinds of feeders. And this Cooper’s hawk came in and there was I was a junco, a dark-eyed junco right underneath the feeder. And the Cooper’s hawk all of a sudden, my husband was looking out the window and he’s like, Gail, come over here, because we’re both big bird watchers, too. And he’s like, the junco just froze. Absolutely froze, did not move a muscle. You couldn’t even see this bird breathe. And here comes the Cooper’s hawk all of a sudden and landed right above this junco, like maybe 10 inches, eight inches. And that junco did not move, did not blink, did not anything. And that Cooper’s hawk was hunting. That bird was looking around and really looking around and intent and intent and intent and sat there for a good, I don’t know, three to five minutes and then flew off. Just like, OK, can’t find anything here. Flew off. Took about another 30 seconds and the junco went back to whatever it was doing. Raptors generally are motion hunters, not always, but motion hunters. So they are looking for that movement. And so by freezing, that is one type of strategy that a songbird can employ. Another strategy is they’ve got lookouts. They’re always listening to each other, even if it’s different species of birds. And blue jays, for example, are a wonderful lookout because they’re loud and they’re always looking. And so they might do an alarm call. Everybody in the neighborhood, all the songbirds are like on alert and they either freeze or they fly. They said, we’re out of here. Both of those strategies can work really, really well. Now, of course, sometimes they don’t work. And then those are the birds that feed the Cooper’s hawk. Anyway, for folks that that are really concerned about their songbirds, just know that they also have defenses that can keep them going for a long time.
[00:14:18] Stina: Who are our best mice eaters in the cities?
[00:14:22] Gail: Oh, mice eaters. There’s a lot of raptors that will eat mice, including larger raptors like red tail hawks. But generally, our good mousers are going to be things like barred owls, screech owls, saw-whet owls and birds like broadwing hawks. Some of the smaller raptors that we have around. And most raptors are opportunistic, which means that, huh, do I think I can catch it? Oh, if I think I can, I may try, whether it’s something close on the menu or not. Generally speaking, however, the raptor will have what’s called a search image in their head. They were taught by their parents that that rabbit is something you go after and you eat. And so then those young red tail hawks, for example, will more than likely focus on rabbits or something similar. But that doesn’t mean when they’re young and they’re on their own that they’re not going to try lots of different things because they have to in order to survive. A lot of our smaller raptors are definitely mouse eaters.
[00:15:31] Stina: I think that’s something a lot of suburban or like the semi-rural, semi-suburban people are like, “oh, man, I moved out here into the suburbs and I’ve never had mice before. And now I have mice in my in my house.” I’m like, yeah, you need a raptor. You need a raptor to help you out.
[00:15:48] Gail: The other thing to think about, if you get mice in your house, for example, is we would at the Raptor Center and a lot of other wildlife rehabilitators would highly suggest that you, if you’re interested in getting rid of the mice, definitely find out where they’re getting in and plug those holes. That helps with your energy bills as well as keeping things not chewed because mice have to chew. But if you feel that you need to get rid of the mice, which I feel that pain too, because I have an older house, is use snap traps. Don’t use glue traps. And if I can really highly suggest, strongly suggest, do not use poison. The reason I say that is that if you like the raptors in your neighborhood, don’t use poison, because the poison that you put in your house, in your basement, for example, and the mouse takes a little bit of it, they probably are not going to die immediately. And they start not feeling very good, but they don’t stay in your house. They will go out in the neighborhood, maybe go next door, maybe just be in your garden a little bit. And that raptor, let’s say it’s a red tail hawk, is looking down from a tree or something and says, “Huh, you look pretty easy to catch. I might try to catch you.” And then if they catch that mouse, they get a tiny little dose of poison. That little dose of poison is probably not going to injure that red tail hawk right away. But you have enough of those little poison pill mice. And now you start not feeling very well yourself. And that might mean you don’t feel very good. You might get hit by a car. You might not feel very good. You start starving because you’re not eating because you don’t feel very well. And the Raptor Center does get a number of these birds in. We know that it is some type of toxicity. It can be very difficult to pinpoint and test for exactly what kind of toxicity, because you have to be very, very specific on what kind of test you’re asking for. But we we treat it like a toxicity and some of those birds we can recover and some of those birds we can’t. And it’s definitely a challenge in the urban environment, using poisons to take care of mice or rats or whatever. Sometimes people are putting it out in their yard, not just in their house. But definitely if it’s in your house, use snap traps.
[00:18:09] Stina: What are some challenges that as we see urban expanse in Minnesota, but also in general, you know, everywhere. What are some challenges that us pesky humans are creating? And how are our Raptors adapting to human expanse?
[00:18:26] Gail: Oh, my goodness. OK. So we tend to put obstacles in front of wildlife without thinking. Right. We have our soccer nets up because we want to play soccer. Of course we do. And why wouldn’t we? But it’s on a big expanse of grass. But we don’t always put the soccer net back up. Right. It becomes night. Here comes a great horned owl. Great horned owl is trying to catch a rabbit. It’s flying after the rabbit. The rabbit is able to either sneak underneath the net or maybe through the net. The great horned owl hits the net and gets tangled in it. Other wildlife can get tangled in nets like that, too. So that is one just obstacle. We don’t even think about it. We just put them up and don’t think about it. Chimneys are another. Barred owls right now are looking for places to nest. A lot of animals are. But barred owls are cavity nesters and chimneys look right about the right size and they will get into a chimney and then end up going down the chimney and can’t get back out because it’s too slippery, it’s too tall, it’s too whatever. There’s a lot of different things. They get covered with soot. They’re not thermoregulating properly. And now we’ve got a bird stuck in a chimney. We often get calls at this time of year and a little bit earlier saying, “I see this bird, it’s in my fireplace. What do we do?” And so we do have trained volunteers that will go out and help get these birds out of the chimney. And our suggestion is to cap the chimney. Now, of course, there’s competing things because we have birds like purple martins and we have birds like in particular chimney swifts who also can use chimneys that aren’t being used during the summer and they can use them to roost in and in some cases nest in. And if you cap the chimney, then that’s not available to them. So there’s kind of competing challenges there. Both are habitat. But one is not very good for the bird, for the barred owl, and the other might work very well for the chimney swift. But we do suggest overall to cap your chimneys. It does keep squirrels out. It keeps birds like wood ducks out. It keeps barred owls out. It keeps a lot of these birds out or animals out that we may not want in the chimney and may be very compromising. So that’s another thing that we put in front of wildlife that we don’t even think about. Roads are a huge, huge challenge, but also can be a benefit. A bird like a redtail hawk can use roadways. They use roadways to actually hunt. So their habitat requirements are fulfilled often by roadways. So redtail hawks, for example, are an edge species. They need trees on one side that they nest and rest in and sometimes hunt in. And then they need wide open areas, and that’s where they often hunt. And so you will often see on a lot of our highways and freeways in our urban environment and around our urban environment. And you look up on the light poles and guess what you see? You see redtail hawks. And so they’re looking, they kind of are looking, looking, looking. Is there a bunny? Is there a mouse? Is there something else I’d like to hunt? Let’s say it’s across the road and they take off and it often they will go, they’ll dip down. And if they’ve got their eyes on the prize, which happens to be a mouse, that may take them pretty darn low. And if they’re inexperienced, especially, they may bring them right in front of a car or right in front of a truck and get hit. And now, of course, he didn’t get the mouse and now he’s injured as well. So that’s something else that we put in front of wildlife. But there’s there’s lots of different things. Glass on buildings. It affects a lot of songbirds, especially on migration. They see they see the reflection of the glass. They don’t see the glass. And so they think they’re going being able to go through to that tree reflection or the clouds in the sky. Raptors can hit windows as well. A lot of times, what happens with them is they’ll be flying after another bird, for example. That bird might be able to avoid the glass because they’re a resident bird and they understand where that glass is. But the Cooper’s Hawk, for example, doesn’t. And we’ll go headfirst into that glass and sustain major head trauma. Sometimes they’re also killed when they hit, if they hit really, really hard at what I call terminal velocity.
[00:23:02] Stina: Is that why sometimes you see I’m trying to think of some buildings nearby. There’s one the windows on the top floor of the Planned Parenthood in uptown. They have bird shaped outline stickers. And is that to break up their reflectiveness?
[00:23:16] Gail: It is. And there’s a lot of work that has been done on windows. And if you go to the American Bird Conservancy, they have a whole area on windows and what you can do. The do it yourself. The ones that you get, like if you’re building a new building, before you look at the Bell Museum on the St. Paul campus, all of their windows are what is called fritted glass. And so when you look, when you’re on the inside looking out, you barely see any difference when you look when you’re on the outside and you’re at a certain angle, you can see barely a grid marks on the windows. And those grid marks are between one and two inches apart in all directions. And that’s the key is you have to have the interrupting of the glass close enough that the bird doesn’t think it can pass through. So when you see those falcon silhouettes that you can just buy and put up one in your on your picture window at home, it’s not going to do it because they’ll avoid that spot, but they’ll hit on the other side. So we have a big picture window here at home. And the very first thing we did was we went and this is not to plug a certain company, but we went to a company called Kaleidoscape. And they had a tape that had little tiny squares of reflective UV reflective material. And we put them all on the outside of the window, not the inside, but the outside of the window, because we were getting a lot of bird hits. Some were glances so we could help the bird. A lot of them were not. A lot of them, the birds had terminal velocity and died because they hit the window. So we went from, I don’t know, 40 or 50 in the springtime hitting our picture window in the front to zero by putting that tape up. And again, it needed to be that one to two inch apart all the way around. So when I look through that window, I don’t even notice those little squares anymore. And from the outside, people don’t really notice or even comment ever on that. But there’s a lot of other DIY projects you can do to prevent birds from hitting glass. And that’s a big one. We are in the Twin Cities in a major migratory pathway, not just for raptors, but for all bird species that migrate. And we’re on the Mississippi Flyway. And it is one of the reasons that the Raptor Center is where it is and has been able to do so many raptors every single year is because these birds are passing through Minnesota on this flyway to go to the southern part of the United States and Central and South America. And then they come back on the Mississippi Flyway in the spring. And so the Raptor Center last year had the highest number of admits we have ever had. We’ve had over 1200 injured and orphaned raptors come through our doors last year. Every year, we’ve been generally seeing a 10 percent to maybe 15 percent increase. But part of that is, of course, our urban landscape is expanding. Part of it is because we have a lot of concerned citizens. I think environmental education and education from places like the Raptor Center has people more appreciating what raptors actually do for us and that they have inherent value to the ecosystems more than they’re just a competitor because they’re predators and we’re predators, too. So I think it is shifted. Our perceptions of these animals have shifted, which I think is a wonderful thing. And if you have not been to Sax-Zim Bog, and I’m going to suggest that to all the listeners, too, it is well worth going. There is a visitor center there now and Sax-Zim Bog is a bog, but it’s not like you think of like one big park or wildlife management area. These are roads that people travel on all the time for home, for work. That kind of thing. But there is a lot of bog on each sides of the roads. So you need to be polite and you need to be very mindful that people are using these roads to get to and from places. So you need to pull off and be polite and that kind of thing. But you can see northern hawk owls and great gray owls. And during an eruption year, you can see things like snowy owls on some of the open areas. Or if you go to some of the airports like the Duluth Airport, there’s places to watch for snowy owls. And at MSP, there’s also some Minneapolis, St. Paul Airport. There’s also places that you can go just to watch snowy owls. Boreal owls are up there. There’s a lot of different species of owls, a lot of other species of of northern birds, too, whether it’s boreal chickadees or different kind of gross beaks or things like that. It’s a fantastic place. But Minnesota in general is that we have because of a huge boom in insect populations during the spring and the summer, especially in northern Minnesota in the Northwoods. That’s what brings so many songbirds to Minnesota from the rainforest every year. They do this trek twice a year. And once they’re up here to raise their young and then they make the trip all the way back down to Central and South America. Now, other birds that are predatory birds like peregrine falcons, for example, will follow and they will follow these birds because that’s their main food source. So peregrine falcons are an incredibly massive success story in the United States, but especially in the Midwest and the Raptor Center. Now, peregrine falcons were an endangered species for a very long time because of a chemical that we used to kill insects called DDT. And so their population plummeted. And often we see challenges in the environment from these top of the food chain predators like peregrine falcons. So the Raptor Center in the 1970s, and especially in the 1980s, working with the University of Minnesota, said we’re going to try to bring peregrine falcons back on the map in the Midwest. So they started releasing young peregrine falcons that falconers were breeding for falconry and they were able to get these chicks and do something called hacking. And hacking is a word that just means slow release. It’s a falconry technique for slow release. You don’t just toss them in there and say good luck to you. You feed them and support them without them knowing that it’s a human doing it. And then they can fly, but they can always get support from that particular site they were released from until they themselves wean themselves off. So they started doing the hacking project in places where peregrines were normally found. And the place in Minnesota that they started doing this was called Weaver Dunes or is called Weaver Dunes. It’s in the southern part of the state. And it didn’t work. We figured out that these young peregrines didn’t have adult support to kind of help teach them other problems out in the environment, like great horned owls that would easily try to take a young peregrine falcon and did. The young peregrine falcons didn’t have the adults to help them out. So then they started talking to all these different scientists, especially at the University of Minnesota and saying, well, why don’t we try something novel? And there was a lot of pushback on this when it was first suggested. Why don’t we try to release these birds in cities? These are cliff nesting animals. Skyscrapers are natural cliffs. There’s a prey base. There’s birds in the city, including things like pigeons and other birds passing through and not as many other predators like great horned owls. A lot of people are like, no, it’s not going to work. They are going to get hit by cars. They’re going to hit windows. They’re going to all these things. But the Minnesota DNR Department of Natural Resources, the University of Minnesota with Bud Tordoff and also the Raptor Center said, we think we can do this. The Nature Conservancy got involved as well. I was a hack site attendant for several places, but we started releasing these birds in cities. And the reason you want to do this when they’re younger is because they imprint. They kind of say, “this is where I’m supposed to be.” And if it happens to be a city, well, then that’s where I’m supposed to be. So a young peregrine falcon starts flying around, learning how to hunt, getting supported at this hack site with food until they’re ready to go and be on their own. And then peregrine falcons fly to central and South America for about a year and a half. And then they come back when they’re two or a little bit older than two. They come back and they start looking for places to nest. And we’ve had places for them to go to. So then they started raising their young. And guess what? Then those young, when they’re out on their own, when they come back from central and South America, they start looking for cities. What happened over time is these birds started taking up all the quote unquote good available nest sites and territories in the cities and then naturally started going back into the natural areas. So these birds are found all in a lot of different places in Minnesota, back on cliffs underneath bridge decks. That’s another place that they’re often found. And they’re all over Minnesota, not just in the cities. So great success story. And it has everything to do with cities.
[00:33:01] Stina: Oh, I love that.
[00:33:05] Gail: Isn’t that a great story? If you go to Midwest Peregrine Society, if you just type that into your browser, it has the whole history and ongoing progress with the birds, because every year, many of those young Peregrines at a certain age before they can fly, people go up and put bands on their legs. So these are people who have permits from the USGS, so the Geological Survey that can put bands on the federal band on one leg and on the other leg, excuse me, is what’s called a project band. Those are easy to see with binoculars or with a spotting scope. And so they monitor the chicks and then they can tell who the parents of who is and everything. So they have almost genealogy of a lot of these birds, especially in Minnesota, but in the Midwest. It is pretty crazy. It’s really cool. Midwest Peregrine Society. You should check it out.
[00:34:01] Stina: When I lived in the Florida Keys prior to moving here, I was so excited that there are Peregrine Falcons in the Keys and then learning more about them, I was like, oh, they are the ones that are they’re from the north. They’re on their way south. They they hang out in Miami for a little bit. And then they keep going south and they end up in South America, Mexico, Cuba. And then, yeah, it was like a certain couple of weeks during the year. You would only see them while they’re on their way and then in the opposite season on their way back up. And it was like, oh, I felt like a freeway stop.
[00:34:37] Gail: It’s exactly what it is. It’s an invisible freeway. Right. It’s an invisible freeway. The other thing that I like to think about, especially with peregrines, but osprey too, and other raptors that migrate, they are birds of two worlds. Right. They’re here. And we think of them as being here and being a Minnesota bird. Right. But they’re here. But actually, when they’re in Central and South America, depending on the species of raptor, they’re in the rainforest. It’s a completely different world. And they have some different strategies for surviving down there than they do up here. And so, you know, thinking about them that way is a great way to think about, you know, you act locally, but you think globally because helping to keep habitat as much as we can in both places is really important.
[00:35:27] Stina: So I’m a birdwatcher and I’m sure a lot of listeners are also birdwatchers. Shout out to Nahree. We’re going to plan some some birdwatching trips soon. So when we’re thinking about birdwatching, especially raptors and especially during the nesting season, what are some ethical birdwatching tips that you might have for listeners?
[00:35:49] Gail: One of the first things that I would suggest, especially to folks like you who are birding curious and are interested in learning how to do more birding or where to find birds and things like that, is that Minneapolis and St. Paul have bird alliances and their birding groups is basically what they are. And they have monthly meetings, but they also have outings for new birders. They will say, “hey, we’re going to meet at this park on this date and we’re going to take you around and teach you how to bird and what what you’re looking for.” It doesn’t necessarily have to be songbirds. It often can be raptors, things like that. And they will also teach you the ethics of birdwatching and bird photography. A lot of people love and I’m one of them a lot of photography around birds. So one of the biggest ethics we talk about at the Raptor Center is especially around owl photography. But this can translate into other raptors, too, especially during the nesting season. But even if it’s not during the nesting season, is we don’t want to get so close that we’re disturbing them, that we’re actually making them fly away or not be able to hunt or those kinds of activities, especially in the winter time. Sometimes when snowy owls come down and you see them, let’s say it’s on a snowbank and it seems, oh, I can get really, really close and take a picture and they don’t react. They’re not moving. They’re not anything. But they actually might be and they might be saying, “look, I got to sit really still because I’ve got this big predator that has a big eye camera lens, big eye staring at me. And I’m depending on my camouflage. So I need to just sit still.” So maybe you are causing them not to hunt when they need to hunt, especially in the winter time. The other thing that people sometimes do, especially with birds like snowy owls, I’m not interested in giving anybody an idea to do this because I do not think it’s ethical. Is taking mice that you might buy from a pet store and throwing it out to something like a snowy owl. And sometimes they will go catch those mice and eat them. And you’re thinking, “well, this is great. I’ve got great photographs and I help feed a snowy owl.” Well, what if that snowy owl starts associating, which they can learn, associating food with people? Now, maybe they start approaching people even closer. And if I come along and I want to do photography and now this bird is moving closer, if I didn’t know owl behavior, which I do, I might think, well, this is great. But me going out and this has happened to me, birds will come closer and I’m like, “you’ve been fed. I know you’ve been fed.” So if they start becoming dependent on humans, but most people aren’t feeding them, that’s not a good thing. We want them to be natural and try to hunt on their own. That is what they are out there for. We should not be interfering with that. Now, if an animal does get injured because it gets hit by a car, gets accidentally shot, hits a fence, hits a window, those are all anthropogenic causes for these animals to get hurt. The Raptor Center, like a lot of wildlife rehabilitators, feel an obligation to try to help those animals get back to the wild. But that’s different than tossing out mice for these animals. And if the mouse doesn’t get caught, that’s another ethical thing, too. Now, what are we doing? We’re tossing out something that shouldn’t be out in the wild, out in the wild. What does that do? Are we introducing a disease accidentally? You know, what are we doing? We don’t always know. And in fact, most of the time we’re tinkering and we don’t even know what the end result might be. So as far as ethics, as far as photography, distance is the thing. Now, I know almost everybody’s got a cell phone and those cell phones have cameras. And I, for one, love the cameras on my cell phone. And I love video on my cell phone. It’s helped me identify animals. It has helped me take some pictures. But I also know that it has a limit. And it means that you don’t have a right. And I’m going to say that you don’t have a right to walk up to an animal just because you would like to get closer with your cell phone camera. If you were truly interested in wildlife photography, any kind of wildlife photography, you need to make the investment in the cameras and the lenses and and they’re not cheap, but you can get them cheaper than than just retail. That’s what I do. I get a lot of used equipment and I’ve made the investment to do that. By doing that, I can keep the animals safer and I can also get some pretty darn good photography. The other thing there’s now Wyze cameras and and Ring cameras and all these other cameras that you can have out there. You don’t even have to be out there. And you can see some pretty incredible things that you couldn’t otherwise see. And that’s where those nest cams come in. When nest cameras first came out and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology has a lot of different kinds of Nest cams. That’s one that you could just dive deep into and never get any work done. Just like the DNR cams on the Eagles and the Peregrine. When they first came out, what was really interesting is that people, just like you and me, got really invested in watching and really invested in is that chick going to survive? And we named the chicks and now we have a stake in it and everything. But what it did do is really gave biologists, but just the general public, a view into a nest that we never would have gotten otherwise. And that is so interesting because a lot of people have found out that not every chick makes it. It can be very sad in a nest and other animals might come in and predate the chicks or there’s accidents that happen or the weather happens or lots of other things happen. It’s not Disney. Yes, we want it to be Disney, but it’s not. I think it’s given a real good wake up call to a lot of people who watch. I want people invested in these animals, whatever their success is. But the nest cams are really, really interesting. Interesting from the general public perspective, as well as the science perspective. But check out Cornell Lab of Ornithology and also the Minnesota DNR web cams for Eagles and for Peregrines.
[00:42:25] Stina: If listeners would like to learn more, where can they go? Also, we heard you do tours. And I don’t know if Ian knows this yet, but we’re doing a field trip at some point.
[00:42:36] Gail: Oh, awesome. So the Raptor Center, as I mentioned earlier, has an ambassador animal education department, conservation education. We do close to a thousand programs a year with these birds on site and off site. So we go to classrooms, we go to community events. We go to the state fair. We go to a whole lot of county fairs. So we try to get out there because we want people to learn a lot more about these animals and how important they are to our ecosystems. But you can also come to the Raptor Center for a program for a hatch day party (that’s what we call birthdays) and/or a tour. We are open Tuesday through Sunday for tours. And you can go to our website, the Raptor Center dot org. We do walk in tours, but you can also reserve a time, especially if you’ve got 10 people. So check us out on the on the website to see what we offer. And if there’s something you’re like, well, I would really like to do a Raptor themed birthday party. You know, give us a call. And, you know, we always have an educational component to it. You can also another way to get involved with the Raptor Center is not just come for a tour, come volunteer. We have over 300 volunteers that help us do the work that we do. And in fact, we could not do the work we do with our volunteers and they’re in education. They’re in our clinic. We have a flight crew that helps exercise the birds to get them ready for release. We have a transport crew. We have a rescue crew. So we have lots of different areas where volunteers help us out.
[00:44:09] Stina: And if folks are listening and they’re from far away, I bet you are always accepting donations.
[00:44:15] Gail: Yes, we are. I’m so glad that you brought that up. Usually I’m more on top of it. But so the Raptor Center is part of the College of Veterinary Medicine. We do get some support from the University of Minnesota, but we really, really depend on donations from individuals. The money really gets used wisely and gets used to try to help these birds get back to the wild.
[00:44:38] Stina: How many birds do you all rehabilitate per year?
[00:44:41] Gail: Well, 2025 was the largest yet, and that was over 1200 Raptors that came through our door. We are right coming in the cusp right now in 2026 of baby season. And in fact, our first youngsters showed up last week or the week before, and they were baby great horned owls. Baby great horned owls or baby barred owls are almost always one of the very first that come through the door that get found and brought through our door. And our philosophy with youngsters is to try to get them back into their nest if we can. That’s the number one priority for baby great horned owls or any species. I’m not a great horned owl. I can’t teach this chick how to be a great horned owl like the wild parents can. So our first goal is to get them back to their parents. If we can’t get them back to their parents, we can often foster the chicks into another nest of the same species. We never overload a nest. So we never put more in a nest than they would naturally have. And we have to make sure that the chick we’re putting in is of the right age so that they’re all growing up the way that’s supposed to. We’ve been doing this for over 50 years, so we know. We know how to do it.
[00:45:52] Stina: Do you have any other questions, Ian?
[00:45:54] Ian: I know that down in Wabasha, there’s the National Eagle Center and there’s closer to Winona. I feel like there’s like an owl focused one somewhere?
[00:46:02] Gail: There is! The International Owl Center.
[00:46:04] Ian: Is there any relationship between like the Raptor Center and those businesses, those locations?
[00:46:10] Gail: Yeah, so we were – just backing up a little bit. We work with all the rehabilitators, the permitted wildlife rehabilitators in the state of Minnesota. We work back and forth between a lot of them. But places like the National Eagle Center down in Wabasha, if they get an injured animal, they will send it up to us. We sometimes will cooperate on different studies and things. They do a lot with wild golden eagles, but also certainly if they get any anything injured, they will send them up to us. Same thing with the Owl Center. We work fairly closely with them. They are in a part of the state that there are really no wildlife rehabilitators. On the northern side, we do some things with Hawk Ridge as well. And then down here in the cities, there is a place called the Arsenal. It’s right off of County Road I. And it used to be way back in World War II, is where they made ammunition or one of the plants for ammunition. It’s no longer used for that. But certainly the federal government uses it for a training place. But there’s a thousand plus acres there. And so they’ve been trying to transform a lot of the areas into more natural habitat. They have kestrel boxes up and they have osprey platforms. And there are I’m on a team that helps monitor the kestrels throughout the spring and the summer and osprey. And we band osprey. We band kestrels there as well. The Raptor Center also works with them. We’ve done studies with bird flu, highly pathogenic avian influenza with those folks as well. The Raptor Center. So this is slightly where we will be working with a lot of other facilities and we have, but we have just started a study that has been donor driven, which is wonderful, is that we are looking at juvenile bald eagles and we’re always trying to improve what we do. Not just medically, but when we release these animals back to the wild. And juvenile eagles, traditionally, if we get them during the summer or late summer or fall, especially in the fall, we don’t release them right away. We wait until January, which seems weird. But what we do, what natural history in bald eagles, at least in Minnesota and in the Midwest, is once the juvenile bald eagles are, I don’t want to say kicked out by their parents, but they’re no longer being taken care of by their parents, they start following around any adults. Now, juvenile bald eagles do not look like adults. So juvenile bald eagles are all brown, brown beak, brown eyes, as well as brown feathers. And the closer they get to five years old, the more white they have in their head, white they have in their tail. And then by the time they’re between five and seven years old, they have the yellow beak, yellow eyes, and they’re considered an adult. But before that, with those juvenile colors, they kind of get a pass from the most adults. So the adults will tolerate being chased. The adults will drop food, all this kinds of stuff where the adults would not tolerate this from another adult, visually adult. So what we have done is we wait until January when a lot of eagles are down from Canada and a lot of eagles are concentrated in places where there’s open water. And one of those places is down near Winona and Red Wing. And that area often stays open. So there’s a lot of waterfowl down there. There’s fish down there. But because eagles really need open water in the winter time, a lot of eagles gather there. And so what we have traditionally done is release these youngsters out into this population of adults. We have observed the birds. We’ve watched the natural history. We know what the natural history is. So for the most part, we think we’re successful. Well, we want to really up our game here. So what we’ve been able to do is get enough donor help to get GPS telemetry units. We can follow these birds. We don’t have to watch them. We don’t have to see them. We like to get eyes on them if we can. But we’ve already put three backpacks on some juvenile eagles that we released in January. We’re going to do up to 20. So we want a control group of birds, young birds that get put back into the nest. And then we’re going to put half on birds that end up coming into care, like in late summer and fall. And when we release them in January, like we have in the past and see what happens and see if we’ve got better outcomes one way or the other. What we’ve seen so far with just the three, it’s not enough data. But what we’ve seen is that they are hanging out with adults and other young eagles. So we’re hoping that these juveniles are doing what we think that they should be doing is harassing the heck out of the adults for food.
[00:50:57] Stina: That’s cool. I might have an impossible question for you. What’s your favorite Minnesota raptor either to work with directly or just to see out in the wild?
[00:51:09] Gail: Oh, my goodness. It is sort of an impossible question. Generally, it’s the bird I’m working with currently. I do have a favorite raptor and it is a red tail hawk. If I came back as a raptor, it would be a red tail just every single time. I love how there’s like 17 different subspecies. I love that each one is so individual in their coloring. They all have that rusty red tail when they’re an adult, but they sometimes have barring across their chest. They sometimes don’t. There’s sometimes light, there’s sometimes dark. And you can start to identify them when you even when you’re on the freeway and you’re seeing them on the light poles. I just love that. They’re generalists. And my personality, I’m a generalist to the core. So I love knowing things about everything and they will eat almost anything. But you have red tail hawks are my heart bird. That’s that’s sure. The red tail that was recorded that you hear in all the movies. [hawk screech plays]
[00:52:12] Stina: Is it one bird?
[00:52:13] Gail: Every single frickin movie is one bird. It was recorded in like 1977 and I found the article and they were talking about audio and they were talking about how hard it is to get nature – clean, audio – and they specifically called out this red tail hawk. And apparently people don’t think that bald eagle sound cool enough because they always use a red tail hawk call instead of a bald eagle call, which is crazy.
[00:52:44] Stina: Right, it’ll be like this like a spirit of America, like patriotic image. And then I’m like, and that’s the wrong bird on the picture.
[00:52:54] Gail: Now, another interesting factoid about eagles. And this is I can make the case for other birds that are found in the places like Florida, Minnesota and Alaska. But let’s just talk about eagles is that the eagles that are found in Alaska are bigger than they are here in Minnesota. And they’re bigger here in Minnesota than they are in Florida. And it has everything to do with the weather. The warmer it is, the smaller you can be. The bigger you are when it’s colder, is it actually helps keep you warm. You have less surface area and it’s all physics, but you have less surface area. So bald eagles in Alaska are big. In Minnesota, in general, we have between eight pounds and some of the biggest ones are about 12, 12 pounds. We’ve had a few a little bit bigger than that. But in Alaska, they kind of start at 13 pounds.
[00:53:49] Stina: That’s so huge!
[00:53:52] Gail: And so bigger, like 15, 16 pounds. And and in reality, when you look, it’s one of my favorite questions that I ask at the Raptor Center when people come by, is they look at one of our eagles and I’ll say, well, how much does this bird weigh? And what we what all humans do is we compare things to what we know. So you’re thinking about the Thanksgiving turkey. You’re thinking about your cat. You’re thinking about your kid, things like that. So most people will guess a lot heavier than what these birds actually weigh. Birds that fly, there are some exceptions to this, but birds that fly want to be lightweight. So feathers are light. They’re not heavy. And a bird like a bald eagle has I think it’s around 7000 feathers. I didn’t have to count them. Yay. But about 7000 feathers. And they’re light and their bones are almost hollow. They’re called pneumatic. So they’re not hollow like a straw is hollow. Think of like cutting a sponge in half and you have a lot of air pockets. And that actually is part of the respiratory system. They’re much better at utilizing oxygen and pulling oxygen out of the air because they actually have a chance at it twice. We have a chance at it once we breathe it in. We breathe it out. We have a chance at getting oxygen once they have twice. Won’t explain completely their respiratory system, but they have lungs like we do and air sacs. And it’s absolutely fascinating. But part of that respiratory system is in their humerus, which is in their upper arm bone, quote unquote arm bone, and in their femurs, which is the upper leg bone. And that’s part of the respiratory system. It also helps them be very lightweight. And that is all to help them to fly. And even being let’s say you’re 12 pounds as an eagle, you still have a six foot wingspan. Yep.
[00:55:43] Stina: It’s like that’s you.
[00:55:44] Ian: That’s me. Yeah.
[00:55:47] Gail: Yeah, it’s crazy. It’s crazy. It’s hard to imagine because we are so land bound. Yeah, we can jump into an airplane, right? I get it. But, you know, we’re mammals and we’re supposed to be on the ground.
[00:56:01] Ian: The zoo has that great display on the wall where you get to like.
[00:56:05] Stina: Oh, what’s your wingspan? Yeah, like your wingspan with different.
[00:56:08] Gail: Yeah, we have that, too. Just raptors, but we have that, too. Oh, because it’s pretty cool. It’s pretty cool.
[00:56:14] Stina: Oh, sweet.
[00:56:16] Gail: There we go.
[00:56:17] Stina: Well, thank you so much, Gail. This has been this has been a delight. I oh, man, I want to schedule our visit.
[00:56:25] Gail: Oh, please do. Please do. And yes. Well, thank you. I I enjoy talking about birds.
[00:56:30] Ian: And thank you for joining us for this episode of the Streets.mn Podcast. The show is released under a Creative Commons attribution, non-commercial, non-derivative license. So feel free to republish the episode as long as you are not altering it and you are not profiting from it. The music in this episode is by Erik Brandt and the Urban Hillbilly Quartet. This episode was produced by Stina Neel, edited by Jeremy Winter,transcribed by Ian R Buck, and was overseen by the Cooper’s Hawk that nests outside my window. We’re always looking to feature new voices on the Streets.mn Podcast. So if you have ideas for future episodes, drop us a line at [[email protected]]. Streets.mn is a community publication and relies on contributions from audience members like you. If you can make a one time or recurring donation, you can find more information about doing so at [https://streets.mn/donate]. Find other listeners and discuss this episode on your favorite social media platform using the hashtag #StreetsMNPodcast. Until next time, take care.