A huge bird recently fell out of the sky and landed in my neighbor David Slazenski’s front yard.
Slazenski was at work when his step-son, Vincent Medrano, found the bird, so Slazenski texted me to see if I could help. We live in Phoenix — a city known for its desert parks and mountain preserves.
But none of us had ever seen a wild bird quite like this.
“I just love birds, especially birds of prey. They’re so cool. I could tell it was hurt by the way the wing was sticking out,” said Slazenski, who marveled at the size of the bird. “That was a fat one, too. That was over knee high.”
Medrano and I both got on the phone to find a rescue that could come pick it up. Eventually, a man with a net and a cardboard box came by, scouring the neighborhood for the injured bird.
The rescuer didn’t find the bird that afternoon. But the next day, another call came in. A neighbor a few blocks down found it cornered by a colony of cats.
“Her name is Feral, because feral cats helped in her rescue,” said Michelle Anderson, clinic manager at the Wild at Heart raptor rescue, where the bird eventually ended up.
Feral is a red-tailed hawk.
And when I met her a few days later, she wasn’t in good shape. Her wing was wounded and drooping. Her appetite was inconsistent. She perched on Anderson’s arm, glaring at me with amber eyes that were as piercing as the talons on her feet.
Anderson said they believe the bird was electrocuted.
The injury is “pretty serious,” according to operations manager Eric Murray. He’s the man who came looking for the bird in my neighborhood.
“Now we’re at a point of seeing how bad it’s going to get,” Murray said.
He said that most electrocutions lead to necrosis, and once the flesh starts to die, the affected part of the wing has to be amputated.
“Sadly, if it gets to that point, it would have to be humanely euthanized,” Murray said.
This happens to eagles and hawks fairly often.
The data are difficult to compile, but one study from 2014 said that anywhere from about 1 million to nearly 12 million birds are fatally zapped by U.S. power lines every year.
Utilities are well aware.
“Utilities didn’t really realize this was an issue until the 1970s when a lot of the environmental movements were taking place, and folks started noticing birds interacting with utility infrastructure,” said Lesly Swanson, former chair of the Avian Powerline Interaction Committee, a national group of utilities formed to protect birds from electrocution.
You’ve probably noticed small birds perching on power lines without any problem. Swanson said that’s because those birds are only touching the electrified equipment in one spot.
“The electricity tends to just move through them,” she said.
It’s the larger birds with longer wingspans — like hawks, eagles and owls — that can make contact with two different lines. That’s when it gets dangerous.
Electrocution tends to happen when the birds are taking off and landing, said Swanson, a biologist for the Salt River Project, an Arizona utility.
“If it has a rabbit, a fish or a snake in its talons, that could touch one of the phases,” she explained. “And then when the bird opens its wings, that’s when it could get in trouble.”
How do you solve this problem?
If you’ve ever seen a plastic contraption on a power pole or line, that’s a bird guard.
Swanson said they keep the animals from making contact with energized equipment. Utilities can also redesign poles to make the lines further apart. That way, an extended wing on a big raptor won’t reach a second wire.
The state’s largest utility, Arizona Public Service, builds large perching platforms high atop power poles that aren’t connected to electricity.
The goal is to entice the birds to make nests in safer locations.
About 185 birds died by electrocution last year along the utility’s 38,000 miles of power lines, said APS wildlife biologist Mathew Downs.
“Every one of those is really important to us,” he said. “We’d like that number to be zero, but in a perfect world that’s not how it works.”
According to biologists, electrocution really isn’t the biggest threat to raptors.
They fly into high-rise windows, get hit by cars and eat rodents laced with poison. Laura Hackett, a biologist at Liberty Wildlife in Phoenix, said some succumb to glue traps laid down by homeowners to catch other pests.
“It’s usually something where humans have been involved somehow,” she said. “We definitely see gunshots more than we really expect to. We have an X-ray machine. We’re sometimes surprised how many pellets we’ll find inside a bird.”
One recent study suggests that many birds found dead near a power line actually died from a gunshot wound.
Hope for the red-tailed hawk
So where does that leave the unlucky red-tailed hawk that landed in my neighbor’s yard?
When we first met, rescuer Eric Murray told me her recovery would be tough — that she might not make it.
But a few weeks after the injury, her chances are improving.
When I called for an update, Murray told me that while there’s still some fluid seeping from the wound, most of the damaged tissue on the wing has scabbed over.
Her appetite has returned.
“She’s a feisty eater,” he said.
And the utility, APS, tells me it plans to install more bird guards on the power lines in that area to help prevent it from happening again.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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