The other day we received a call from Suffield Base range control. They called to provide us with the UTM coordinates of a injured hawk that was found on the base. From their very vague description it sounded like a Swainson’s Hawk, and it sounded bad. I immediately went to go look for him.
When I got there, this is who I found below the flare stack of a gas plant. I was so relieved to see that the sum total of the Swainson’s injuries were just a set of badly burned flight feathers. After hanging out in my garage for several days sharing Cecil’s food, the little guy was delivered to the Edmonton Wildlife Rehab Center six hours away for a new set of feathers.
Replacing flight feathers is surprisingly easy, and falconers have been doing it for well over a thousand years. Rather than waiting a full year for new feathers to grown in or risking a total alteration in the bird’s molt cycle by pulling the damaged feathers out, a person can do what is called imping. You simply cut the damaged feather low along the shaft, leaving a little bit at the bottom, and then find a corresponding flight feather from a dead bird or a previous molt and cut it at the same point as the old feather. Using a small piece of bamboo placed in the hollow tube of the feather shafts, you can connect the old and ‘new’ feathers with a dab of five minute epoxy. This new imped feather will work just as the old one did, and it will molt just as the old one would have, because technically it is still there.
That means that this Swainson’s can be released before the migration season starts, and he can make through Veracruz and down to Argentina with all the others.
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