Spring and summer can be challenging times for young owls, hawks and eagles. They may tumble out of their nest before they can fly, or their nest might blow down in a heavy storm. Learning to fly isn’t easy and some young raptors may injure themselves in collisions with trees or other structures. And sometimes well-meaning humans interfere, to the detriment of young birds.
Some young raptors can get back into their nest on their own power, but some are going to need help. The Raptor Center at the University of Minnesota sets up a nursery each spring and summer to give such youngsters a second chance. Around 250 young raptors are admitted each year to the nursery, whose goal is to get as many young birds back to their parents as possible, as quickly as possible.
For the lucky few, their time at the nursery is short, if an exam shows no injuries or illness — these can be taken right back to their nest, where parent birds eagerly welcome them. Some require longer stays to give time for bones to heal, but some injuries or illnesses are so severe the patients can’t recover and must be euthanized.
Consider a fuzzy young great horned owl patient whose nest had blown down in a recent storm, with three chicks inside. All three had broken bones, in two cases too severe for recovery. But one had a repairable broken leg, requiring surgery and a splint, then about a month in the nursery to heal.
The young owl’s parents, having lost all their nestlings, had long since departed from the nest area, creating a new challenge: The Raptor Center needed to find another great horned owl nest with adults to serve as foster parents. Their youngsters needed to be a similar age so the foster owlet would fit in, and such a match-up was found in mid-April. There’s simply no substitute for parent owls teaching life lessons a young owl needs, from mastering flight to learning to catch live prey in the dark.
“Raptors are great; they will accept fosters,” says Dr. Dana Franzen-Klein, medical director and manager of the nursery. “After we put a new bird into a nest, we monitor things closely from a distance to make sure it’s successful.”
Great horned owlets are the first to be admitted to the Raptor Center each spring because these owls nest so early, usually starting sometime in February. The first owlets arrived on March 10 this year, with other species following on a later schedule:
“Great horned owls are first, followed by barred owl chicks, then small owls,” Franzen-Klein noted. “The first red-tailed hawks are admitted around Memorial Day and the first bald eagles around July 4.”
