The Need: New Enclosures

Simply put, the Shelter does not have the enclosures it needs to meet the increasing demand for its hospital services, to provide the highest-quality hospital services, and to provide the hospital services in the most efficient manner possible.

The Shelter’s wildlife hospital currently lacks sufficient capacity, and this problem will worsen as more patients require our help. The Shelter receives two-thirds of its patients between April and August. During the height of this busy season in 2007 and 2008, the Shelter had over 100 patients on site and reached capacity. This left us with no choice but to be selective when taking in patients.

These capacity constraints cause two other problems: the quality of care suffers and the efficiency of the operation decreases. In order to explain these problems, we must explain the three-stage wild animal rehabilitation process.

Stage One
When a patient comes into the Shelter, such as a female eagle, the Shelter’s staff immediately diagnoses the eagle and determines whether she has a chance of survival. If she does have a chance of survival, she is given the immediate treatment she needs and is then moved to stage two of the hospital process. If she has no chance of survival, she is immediately given a painless, peaceful death.

Stage Two
Stage two involves keeping the eagle inside the wildlife hospital main facility, where it is quiet and warm. She is kept in a small enclosure where she can’t reinjure herself and our staff can attend to her as often as needed.

Stage Three
Once the eagle has healed (or if the patient is an orphan, the patient is self-feeding), she is moved to stage three. Stage three involves keeping the eagle in large outdoor enclosure where she can re-acclimatize to the elements and, most importantly, exercise and recover her strength (the equivalent of physical therapy) before being released to the wild.

In short, the wildlife hospital services are, just like a human hospital, a multi-stage, sequential operation. If any of the stages in the sequence lack capacity, the entire process is slowed and disrupted. To use a colloquialism, a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. In 2008, the Shelter was able to expand one of the links – the space within the hospital used for stage two. After doing so, it quickly became clear that the Shelter needed much greater capacity in stage three. In other words, it became obvious that lack of capacity in the outdoor enclosures was the weak link.

This weak link caused the entire process to slow down. While we were waiting for patients in stage three to fully recover and be released, we had patients backed up in the hospital (stage two) that should already have been moved outside to stage three. The deleterious effects of this backlog are numerous.

1. The entire hospital operation loses efficiency. Patients are kept in the system longer than they need to be. The care of each patient requires a certain amount of work and funding each day. Extra days spent in the system mean extra costs and extra labor that are unnecessary.

2. The quality of the care declines. When patients are ready to move to stage three, they need to be moved as soon as possible. The longer they are left in small cages in stage two, the more strength they lose and the less likely they will be at full strength when released back to the wild.

3. The possibility of habituation increases. The hospital staff is constantly fighting against the patients (especially orphans) habituating to humans. A habituated animal is an animal that has lost its fear of humans and possibly come to see humans as a source of food, shelter, etc. Habituated animals can lose their ability to survive on their own in the wild and can become nuisance animals that get killed or injured by close proximity to human society. The longer an animal is in our care, the greater the chances of habituation.

In addition to the challenges described above, the Shelter’s current stage three outdoor enclosures are deficient in another respect: They are not of the optimum size for large birds and waterfowl, which are some of our most iconic birds: bald eagles, ospreys, great blue herons, cormorants, red-tailed hawks, large owls, gulls, ravens, etc. Again, this deficiency causes numerous problems.

1. Patients’ chances for survival decrease. The patients are not at full-strength when they are released, which decreases their chance of survival. Currently, the Shelter’s largest outdoor enclosures are 8 x 16 feet. This size is not large enough to allow large birds to fly. If they can’t fly, they can’t exercise and regain their strength. Furthermore, the Shelter has no enclosures with large pools, which means that waterfowl can neither fly and regain flight strength nor swim and regain swimming strength. In particular, diving birds, such as loons, need larger pools.

2. Staff time is used inefficiently. Shelter staff are required to waste extreme amounts of labor and time attempting to make up for the inability of the patients to get proper exercise. Large birds must be creanced, which is a difficult process of taking the birds to a clearing, attaching a light line to the birds, and letting them fly. Creancing takes a substantial amount of time and simply is not as effective as allowing a bird to fly on its own in a large enclosure. Furthermore, waterfowl must be given a small “kiddie” wading pool in their enclosure. This wading pool must be bailed out at least twice per day and refilled. Again, this is an immense amount of work, and the small wading pool is not as effective as a larger, permanent, self-filtering pool.

3. The patients are put through a great deal of unneeded stress. The creancing process, both capturing and transporting the bird and then actually flying the bird, is an extremely stressful process for the bird. Similarly, the process of going into an enclosure and bailing out and re-filling the wading pools is quite stressful on the waterfowl.

The Answer to the Need: The Take Flight Project
Flight Cage and Waterfowl Enclosure