Sandy Pines Wildlife Centre, Incorporated

Caring for injured and orphaned wildlife since 1994 in Napanee, Ontario
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Animal and Environmental News

July 2010
A juvenile osprey was brought to the Sandy Pines Wildlife Centre after a storm blew through a trailer park in the Norwood area. One bird was killed in the incident, probably the mother. The other parent was in the nest and feeding a young one still there. The nest was very high up at the top of a tree, of which the base of the tree was on a slope into a gulley, making the nest unreachable. The chick was brought to the Centre and assessed. There were no injuries and the bird was in good health. Friends of the Osprey were contacted and plans made to re-nest the osprey chick into a nest where there was only one other chick. One of our volunteer drivers  offered to take the bird back to the area it came from to meet up with Friends of the Osprey. The video link above shows you what happened next! 
 
 
Published in the Kingston Whig Standard on April 13, 2010
 
An injured peregrine falcon, nursed back to health at a Napanee wildlife centre, was set free into the skies over Kingston again yesterday amid fears one of its main sources of food is being poisoned.

Sue Meech, director of the Sandy Pines Wildlife Centre, brought the female raptor back to the city to release it near where it was injured in late March in a confrontation with an Ontario Street apartment building. She warned the bird's future health could depend on stopping whoever has been putting out the chemical Avitrol to rid the downtown of one of the falcon's favourite meals -- pigeons. Meech said two pigeons suffering from the effects of the chemical have been brought to her Centre. "If people have only brought in two that are still alive there are probably a hundred out there that have been killed," she said. She explained Avitrol is not designed to kill pigeons but to confuse them so they will fly around in circles emitting distress calls. "It's supposed to scare all the other pigeons away," she said, "(but) if it's not mixed properly or if a pigeon eats too much then the pigeon dies. It's a horrible death." She said the danger to the falcon would come from eating pigeons contaminated with the chemical. "They die," she said.

Meech's fear for the falcon's future was tempered by the pleasure of watching it fly away on two healthy wings yesterday. The bird was brought to the waterfront next to the Pump House Steam Museum in a cardboard box covered by a small blanket. Once the covering was removed, the falcon swept low over the grass and soared up into the sky. Another of those watching was Carolyn Teeple, who first saw the falcon coming towards her building at 135 Ontario St. in late March and thought it was landing on her 15th floor balcony. When she went to check on it, it appeared to want to take off again but couldn't.

"After a while I went out with two oven mitts and a big towel to see if it was injured but it just went down into the crevice between the deck and the glass railing. So I started phoning. I was a little bit annoyed because I went through the phone book and phoned everybody I could find."

She said a half hour later what appeared to be the bird's mate came along, sat for a few minutes, and then flew off again. The bird remained trapped and obviously injured for about two hours, she said. Connie Black, a Kingston volunteer for the wildlife centre, was called to rescue the falcon after the wildlife centre learned of the situation from the Kingston Humane Society. "We suspect it was chasing another bird and it probably struck the building and landed on (Teeple's) balcony," said Black. "It managed to get itself stuck between the concrete and the glass. Luckily I managed to pull it out of the gap." She said the bird had struggled for at least two hours to free itself.

"It looked worse than it really was. The whole one wing was scraped so there was a lot of blood and there was bruising on the body as well." Black, who is licensed to care for migratory birds, took the falcon home and then transported it to the wildlife centre the following morning. "I just made it comfortable and let it rest because she was exhausted. This was the first peregrine I ever handled and I hear they are supposed to be quite feisty but she had been fighting so long she wasn't feisty any more at all."

Meech said the bird had been beating her wings on the stone to try to free herself and badly scraped the leading edge of one wing. The wound was cleaned and the bird was eventually introduced to the wildlife centre's aviary where she soon took flight again. One exciting aspect to the temporary confinement came when the falcon laid an egg. "She probably has laid several before she came in and hopefully she will be laying some more now," Meech said. "Then she will be raising some young ones in the city." But only if she doesn't come in contact with Avitrol, she said. "As long as people don't put that poison down and the bird doesn't eat a poisoned pigeon then we should be okay."

 
State of the Birds Report 2010
In the 2010 State of the Birds report, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology considers one of the greatest environmental challenges of our time, climate change. How will the impacts of climate change influence our bird populations and their habitats? Accelerated climate change as a result of human activities is altering the natural world as we know it, diminishing the quality of our environment. This report calls attention to the collective efforts needed to protect nature’s resources for the benefit of people and wildlife.
 
 
Snowy Owl Tracking Discovers Unsuspected Behaviour: Winter on the Icepack
December 2008: Tracking snowy owls in northern Canada. Satellite studies have revealed the secret behaviour of snowy owls.
Courtesy of Laval University, Quebec.
 
Six of the adult females that we followed in a satellite study spent most of last winter far out on the Arctic sea ice," says Quebec University doctoral student Jean-Francois Therrien. Therrien is working with Professor Gilles Gauthier as part of an International Polar Year (IPY) research project to better understand key indicator species of Canadian northern ecosystems, and their findings could lead to a rethink of the snowy owl's place in the North American ecosystem.
 
The behaviour of the owls is a mystery to scientists. Gilles Gauthier said "It is possible that the owls were preying on seabirds. Bird researchers at coastal field sites have observed snowy owls attacking eiders in winter. This hypothesis will be strengthened if we can match up the locations of our birds with the position of open water leads in the ice, as recorded by other satellite data."
 
The biologists are now keen to find out if Inuit seal hunters ever encounter the large white birds on the ice in winter darkness, as they are trying to grasp the range of the owls from year to year. Therrien stressed the unusual distances the birds migrated from where they were banded on their nesting grounds on Bylot Island, north of Baffin Island. He said "The satellite data showed just how dramatic the owl movements are. They flew huge distances. One owl went to Ellesmere Island, another flew straight to North Dakota and a third ended up on the eastern point of Newfoundland."

   The researchers say that this winter should provide many southern Canadians with a good opportunity to see these magnificent birds. We had the largest abundance of lemmings in many years in our study area this past summer," said Gauthier. "The owls had no problems raising young, so we were informally predicting a strong outward movement of young owls this winter."
 

Judging by numerous newspaper reports and sightings, that prediction has already proved accurate. Gauthier added "The support from IPY and Canada's Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) and the advances in satellite technology have given a huge impetus to what promises to be a revolution in our understanding of this key northern species." The researchers believe that this knowledge can't come soon enough.

 
 
 
Snowy Owls in Distress
We have been receiving calls about Snowy Owls that have migrated into  Southern Ontario and are dying from emaciation. It would seem that there has been a drop in the rodent population in the North, forcing birds to leave in large numbers. Snowies are being seen across  the country from Saskatchewan , Manitoba, Ontario, and Quebec. If you see a Snowy Owl that appears weak, please call the Centre before trying to catch the bird. It is essential that we get them here as soon as possible and treat them for dehydration and starvation. Feeding these birds whole prey or complex proteins may kill them, so food has to be introduced very slowly once the bird is re-hydrated.

 
 
 
 
 
Turkey Vulture Rescue
 
This turkey vulture was shot with an arrow. A concerned citizen reported the birds distress to the Napanee O.P.P. detachment. It was rescued by an O.P.P. officer, who kindly brought it to us. The wound was infected, but after treatment with antibiotics, the bird recovered. Much to our surprise, no damage was done to any major nerves or blood vessels and the b0nes of the wing were intact.  Luckily for the bird, the hunter was a poor shot. After two weeks, the vulture was released near where it was found.