 McCord leads me through her expansive backyard to a group of 8-foot-tall wooden outbuildings, called chambers. Before we reach them, in the quiet woods, I hear a veritable chorus of hoots and clicks and clacking noises. “Who-o-o cooks for you?” the occupant croons. Two soulful brown eyes peer back at me. “This is Snake Davis,” McCord says, introducing us, “my new barred owl.” The residents of these not-so-tiny birdhouses are all raptors—a predatory group that includes hawks, owls and falcons—and McCord is permitted to keep and care for them only through her status as a state and federally licensed wildlife rehabilitator. Most of them have come under her wing after being orphaned or injured. Her aim is to care for them temporarily until they can be released back into the wild, or, if that’s not possible, to care for them permanently. Snake Davis is the new guy on this block, a nonreleasable owl recently assigned to McCord by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and he needs to settle in. He is one of six birds of prey that live here permanently. McCord explains that Snake doesn’t know he’s a barred owl. Well-meaning humans raised him after he fell from a tree as an owlet, and the unnatural association he’s formed between people and food makes him unable to survive on his own. Snake blinks his beautiful eyes and clacks his beak again, a sign that he’s feeling defensive. We don’t disturb him. McCord—who named Snake in honor of an irreverent Atlanta radio personality she admires—mourns that he can never return to nature. Still, he’s not a pet, any more than McCord’s other charges are. But the birds do allow her to handle and help them. It’s clear that there’s some sort of link—call it companionship, if you will—between them, a bond forged by time and trust and training. In her work as a wildlife rehabilitator and educator, McCord draws on a longtime passion for falconry, observing raptors’ ability to fly and take game to determine whether they’re ready to return to the wild. This legendary “sport of kings” is both ancient and highly regulated, and becoming licensed to take game with wild birds seemed natural, McCord explains, as she hails from a hunting family. After passing comprehensive exams on raptor biology and health care, and apprenticing for seven years under a sponsor, she is now a Master Falconer. It’s a rare title for a woman, in what is primarily a man’s field. Still, McCord never planned for a career around birds—mopping up after messy raptors, stretching damaged wings in physical therapy routines, administering medicines to stressed or cranky creatures with razorlike talons. Trained as a scrub nurse, she initially worked for a plastic surgeon until she tired of “doing nips and tucks for middle-aged, miserable, wealthy women.” (Now 48 herself, she says, “I wish I’d been more charitable in my assessment of them.”) She found work instead with a veterinarian who was also a wildlife rehabilitator. “The first owl I came nose to beak with was an epiphany,” she says. “Something about these birds is so incredible to me. He needed help, and I was going to move heaven and earth to make sure he got the best life he could.” McCord eventually acquired her own “rehabber” permits and now takes in a new bird almost weekly.
She takes some of those birds on the road. Four years ago, McCord turned her longtime educational program, “HawkTalk,” into a nonprofit organization (www.hawktalk.org). When Snake is ready, he’ll join other live birds of prey in McCord’s mobile classroom, and the birds will appear in nature presentations at schools, Elderhostels, and civic and Scout meetings across the Southeast. Vultures, however, will not be appearing. McCord shakes her head, recalling ill-fated attempts to add them to her team: “They get carsick.” One aspect of her educational programs is teaching people how to help wild birds. Most of us want to, but we may make incorrect assumptions about these creatures and what to do for them. If you find a baby bird on the ground, for example, leave it alone. Its parents are often watching from nearby, McCord says, and will continue to feed it. If it appears injured or genuinely orphaned, call your local department of natural resources office for assistance. Rehabilitation work requires an enormous amount of physical energy and personal dedication. The running of a small charity is very demanding, especially as funding has dwindled with the economic difficulties of the past few years, but in this field, every pair of hands helps the cause. The larger wildlife rescue centers across the United States handle a daunting number of “patients.” For example, since its inception in 1981, the nonprofit Carolina Raptor Center in Huntersville, North Carolina, has admitted more than 9,500 orphaned or injured birds. The birds’ needs vary. Some suffer from environmental hazards such as lead or chemical poisoning; others have been injured in collisions with cars. Many were orphaned when development encroached on their habitats. Still others were injured when shot or trapped maliciously. The mortality rate for “first-year raptors,” McCord says, is 80 percent. However beautiful the owls and hawks are, however much McCord enjoys sharing her life with them, there is nothing easy about their care. It takes a strong stomach just to feed them. “These birds don’t eat Cheerios and Greek salads,” she says pointedly. She regularly makes a 15-hour run to collect rats and mice donated by an out-of-state research lab, then stores them in one of her four freezers until they’re needed for meals. If this isn’t for the weak of stomach, it isn’t for the faint of heart, either. McCord needs skill and courage to handle birds that are natural-born killers, predators at the top of the food chain. But McCord finds rewards in their antics, particularly those of the birds who stay with her permanently. McCord has grown to love Snake, as well as Scully, a green-eyed screech owl with a deformed beak, and a gawky-looking buzzard she adopted after the little girl who watched over his egg till it hatched was astonished to discover he wasn’t a chicken. Their photos are displayed as proudly as family portraits on her living room walls, and like any fond parent, she regales me with stories about their adventures. “When Snake was a tot, before he could fly, every morning I would get up, and finding him would be like hunting for Easter eggs,” she says. “Each dawn brought a new and exciting place for him to roost. Some mornings, I would find him behind the computer equipment, or stretched out on the couch, lying on his side with his feet straight out. One morning I found him asleep in the bathtub.” McCord is fondest of Sam, a great horned owl who has been with her for more than 14 years. He resides in the “condo,” a chamber that boasts two perches and an extra stretch of flying room. Sam frequently gets invited into McCord’s home. He sits in her lap when she watches TV, or hangs out on the back of the sofa. But like any couple who’ve been together for a long time, the two occasionally wrangle over the remote control. At every opportunity, Sam stuffs it into the couch cushions. “I used to do the same thing to mess with my former husband’s mind,” McCord sighs. “What goes around, comes around.”
I’m overwhelmed by the raptors’ sheer power when McCord takes me to meet Mina, her red-tailed hawk. Mina’s a magnificent creature, about 2 feet tall from head to tail, with cinnamon-colored feathers on her neck and chest. When she hears a rustle in the leaves behind us, Mina whips her head around, and her thick, hooked beak brushes McCord’s eyelashes. McCord doesn’t flinch. She understands raptor psychology and knows how far to trust her. “Rhonda, my very first wild-trapped hawk that I used in falconry, shared a physical bond with me that was almost palpable,” she recalls. “But when I released her three years later, she immediately reverted back to the wild. I would see her working the pond or pasture and go out with the lure and whistle and try to call her down. She would have none of it.” Letting go is hard, but McCord’s
mission is to tend the birds who can’t leave and to release
the ones who can. She says, “You help. You hope. You keep
going. And you know that there is always another bird that will
need just one more chance.” Lynn Coulter, who’s working on a book about heirloom seeds to be published by the University of North Carolina Press, is a freelance writer based in Douglasville, Georgia. |
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PHOTOS COURTESY OF MONTEEN MCCORD |
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HERE
AREN’T ANY 
McCord
stops at one chamber and warns me not to press my face against
the screens. I squint until I can make out a figure resting
on a perch.
