 are tuned in to in the studio here at Davis Media Access. Thanks for joining us. My name is Autumn LaBeirano and joining me today is Dr. Michelle Hawkins who's the director at the UC Davis Raptor Center. Thanks so much for joining us Michelle. Hi, thank you for inviting me back Autumn. It's good to see you again. Likewise and last time we chatted we were actually in the physical studio at Davis Media Access and you had a really big bird. Unfortunately we can't do that today but we're really glad to catch up on some recent developments at the Raptor Center. So first and importantly you have a big anniversary coming up next year. So tell us a little bit about how and when the Raptor Center started and and what its trajectory has been kind of to this point. Yeah so in 2022 we will be celebrating our 50th anniversary of the California Raptor Center and so we're really excited about that. I'm working on all of our celebratory things right now. Hopefully if COVID you know is kind to us we'll be able to get back in person very soon but over these 50 years there's just been such dramatic changes throughout the California Raptor Center from 50 years ago when Franca Gasalora and Elita Mora-Zente were the first directors and were falconers really interested in helping birds that they found that were sick and injured. Two four directors later I'm the fifth director we've had directors that have brought all kinds of different strengths to the programs. Some brought new facilities to the program some brought new groups to the program that we didn't work with in the past and and and today for my time as director I've been director since 2013 we've concentrated a lot on education and in building our educational programs even more than they were before so not only do we rehabilitate sick and injured birds of prey but we also provide educational programs to the general public to K-12 and also to agencies, zoos that need training and handling these birds so we try to provide as much as we can to our community and our surrounding community and it's just been a it's been a great 50 years and I'm so just so happy to have been able to be part of it for this long. I bet so the Davis Enterprise recently did a very nice article on you on on the center and some of the challenges you're facing and we'll get to those a little bit later but one of the comments was about the generational impact that described parents who had been there and I wanted to say that that's my story too I first visited the Raptor Center many years ago as a student at UC Davis and then I raised my children here in Davis and and we visited several times too so it really is a place that sticks with you and and you know that it'll be a good experience you know to take to take your own kids there so that that's a pretty powerful thing and and congratulations on helping to foster and kind of create that kind of environment. This is one of the satisfying things about my job is to hear stories like that autumn. Nice nice I want to ask you how birds come to the center I once my husband and I once had an experience on a on a road trip somewhere down on I-5 where we saw an injured red tail hawk and managed to get it in a box and find a local local place down there by calling around where we could take the injured bird. Do birds come to you in this way or what's the process for that? Yeah absolutely you know the our you know great citizens or general community is out and about in nature in the environment and they find these birds down and so we often get calls of I've found the bird can you come and get it which unfortunately we don't have the capacity to do but people can then if they can get the bird and we can talk them through that and get it put into a box and bring it to us and that's the start of the process. Once the animal gets to us and if the bird could either come prior to COVID the bird could either be dropped off directly at the California Raptor Center or during COVID they're all going to the veterinary medical teaching hospital first and so if it went to the Raptor Center first the the team out there would assess the animal would see whether it needed medical care direct medical care from the veterinarians and if so they bring it over to the teaching hospital. There we have faculty, residents and students who are all working together to as a team for these birds and so we just have the luxury at the hospital of having specialists in every field and so if I have a very complicated orthopedic procedure my orthopedic surgeons often will help me to figure out what's the best way forward with them or if we have an ocular injury an eye injury our ophthalmologist can really help us to make sure that that bird's vision is perfect before we go to release it. So once the medical care has finished or has at least the initial part of it is completed and a plan has been made for the treatment of that animal then the bird goes back to the California Raptor Center which is out Old Davis Road and it's really on the just the south periphery of campus and it's a very beautiful open space quiet for the birds to be able to continue their rehabilitation and our volunteers out there will provide the medical treatments that we've laid out for them and then once a week the veterinarians go out and check on all the patients at the center to make sure everybody's progressing well. Also at the center we do a lot of physical rehabilitation and so that's if you've ever had a fracture an orthopedic injury you know how long it takes to come back from an injury like that these birds have to fly for a living and most of them come in with wing injuries and so they need a tremendous amount of physical therapy which we have an integrative medicine faculty Dr. Jamie Payton who comes and helps us doing not only physical therapy with our hands but using ultrasound and using laser as needed to be able to really help to get soft tissues the tendons and all the muscle surrounding the bone to also get conditioned and ready for that bird to go back and then finally we can check that bird condition that bird make sure it can really sustain what we needed to sustain out there and then we release the bird back as close to the territory as it was found because these birds are territorial and so if we know that it was found at the crossroads of two roads well we can take that bird back to that area and if it's a safe area we can release it back into a territory it came from. That is a well coordinated and intensive effort there's a lot of cooks in this kitchen we have a lot we have a big team. Yeah so about how many birds come to you each year and about how many of those are you able to successfully rehabilitate and release? Sure so in general we see several hundred birds a year it could be anywhere from a hundred birds a year to 400 birds a year depending upon the year we also take birds in sometimes for other facilities as well they excuse me if they have for example an eagle and they need to condition that eagle they don't have a flight that's big enough for an eagle they may transfer the bird to us and allow us to do the final conditioning and then we'll work with that team and take that bird back as well so it so it can be anywhere within those numbers in general there are a lot of birds that come in and as soon as we open the box and see just how bad their injuries are they they may need to be euthanized right away and so the birds we kind of take the birds that we we euthanized right away out of the numbers and out of the numbers that survive greater than 24 hours we're at about a 60 success rate which is very very good for wildlife rehabilitation yeah that's a great metric and you know I know raptors are important in our overall ecosystem they they help keep vermin down they I mean they they have a lot of benefit they're also very at risk I would imagine from cars from rat poison from you know all kinds of things what's the most common type of injury you see or or you could guess at how they were injured yeah sure well the injury itself is very commonly some kind of trauma and so collision and we just use collision as one word because collision could be colliding with a car colliding with a glass window colliding with a wind turbine you know we that collisions are probably the number one reason that they're there the question is is why did they get into that particular situation at that moment in time and a lot of times there's underlying problems for example as you were talking about rodenticides have been a huge problem for us and are still a huge problem all over the country we're really happy that we've got a moratorium on the use of them right now in the state of california and they're we're trying to move a bill forward to actually have a ban on the second generation anticoagulant rodenticides they are really not available for the public use anymore but there's still a lot of it out there and unfortunately we see that as an underlying reason that birds sick and maybe it's just its brain isn't functioning the way it should be functioning and it ends up in front of something or colliding with something so we but the anticoagulant rodenticides have been a big big problem for us even with the ban on lead in the state of california we're still seeing lead cases mostly in eagles and in carrion eating birds such as vultures this is the still the biggest plague for the california condor outside of fire unfortunately but for them the lead intoxication is still a huge problem fortunately they don't get into the collisions that these birds in the urban setting get but there are many other diseases that are underlying and so sometimes they'll come in with a fractured wing with a collision but we'll know that there's something more that's just not quite right about that bird right and so we will then go in and start to investigate further and that often takes us to the reason they were sick to begin with you mentioned covid earlier so let's touch briefly on on the impacts obviously you can't offer you haven't been able to be open to the public and offer as many programs as you usually do i'm wondering how you've programmatically pivoted and then we need to get into the the fiscal impacts you're you're dealing with and and how that affects operations so let's start with programmatically what how have you navigated through the pandemic yeah i mean you you used the word right the word of the year was pivot and so we did have to close our gates to the general public uh university of california data still has a nonessential personnel rule for campus and so for areas like ours that do have a fence they've asked us to remain closed to the general public because they are quote nonessential personnel on campus we can't close the arboretum but we can close the california raptor center for example so we have been closed to the public um we did the pivot and try to develop virtual programs as quickly as we could um we did some fundraising to be able to get some new equipment which worked really well for us and so we've got a very professional setup now to be able to do virtual programs and we did a number of live programs for schools but we also did some recorded programs that we hope will be able to make available as a library in the future so actually some really good things did come out of of us having to do things this way um some of the hardships were of course schools that were that are underfunded title one schools for example that often didn't have the technology to be able to have us come into their classroom and so those are areas where we struggled a little bit to be able to reach some of those classrooms but the hope is is over time as they get some hopefully some of these things worked out um we may be able to provide programs where we don't have to go to the schools but we can still give them some educational information it's not the same as having a live bird right when the last time we met autumn you know we were there we brought a live bird into the studio and there's nothing like a student's face or a child's face when they get up close and personal with that great horned owl they've been hearing hooting in the backyard you know since they were two years old right so um so so pivot was definitely what we had been working on um we also unfortunately had on top of that you know fires and smoke and that's been a big issue for us um we have we develop protocols so that we bring in all of our resident birds when the smoke gets too bad because there's a lot of smoke inhalation injury they could get even though they're not in the density of the fires so we had to work on that last year and that was a real challenge for the birds um and then finally people were desperate to get outside in the summertime last year and so everybody was out trying to find a trail where they could walk and feel like they're in nature and not feel like they were in a disney world line or something and people found a lot more birds and brought more birds into us last year our nursery we had twice the number of birds in the nursery as we usually have and that requires twice the manpower to feed all those little mouths you know some of them need to be fed every two hours at a certain time of their life so we put lots of energy into things like that into training our volunteers um and to working on new programs for volunteers as well and so that was really you know the time that we had that's kind of downtime um we were able to utilize some ways like that that we really think that all of our educational programs really have benefited overall we just really want to see that face again seeing that live bird and then the other part was that our birds went just a little bit feral on us um the the birds that are trained with a glove that would come into your studio that would go out to a school that takes a substantial amount of training with that bird for it to be comfortable standing on that hand in an environment with lights like in the studio or in a classroom where there may be a lot of loud noise um we have to kind of quote bombproof our birds and so um we we had to do a lot more work on them last year and uh when we were able to bring back our volunteers which we had to send our volunteers away for a while too they came back and that was one of their big projects was to really work with our education birds uh to keep their training up so so from that end of things we stayed busy you know just like everybody else we thought downtime no we we really worked and and worked very hard during the whole year for covid yeah um but it was it was a substantial impact on us financially because our programs we we do charge for our programs they cost us money and time and effort to be able to do and so that money didn't come in likewise we didn't have open house events we generally have three events per year uh now that each usually bring about a thousand people to the center we get a lot of donations during those events but um we also sell a lot of merchandise during those events and we make some money off of that as well and so you know all of those things went to zero last year for us pretty much and um so we already kind of went into things with a bit of a deficit for our standard operating uh money and i could tell you just right off the bat you know even prior to budget cuts which i know we're going to talk about um you know we we do have a lot of administrative support from the school veterinary medicine uh there's no doubt about that every single day we get a lot of support from them but when it comes to paying from the medical and the rehabilitative care of these birds you know i have to fundraise for that and so yeah some of the money that would come in from these events were part of that fundraising and and so our fundraising was definitely much lower last year even though we did a couple of big online facebook things to try to get more funding we're also more different than other programs i can't just go out and do a co-go fund me for example um i'm just not able to do that within the university guidelines and if i were in another program outside of uc davis if i needed money to do something i could put up a go fund me site tomorrow so we we are challenging those ways that that other centers aren't yeah it is a double-edged um sword here you're you have support and and resources at the university but you're not a non-profit and you can't you can't do some of the things that non-profits do i do uh understand a lot of the challenges you just mentioned all too well running davis media access myself um as we begin to to wind down to add to all of that the university has cut a big chunk of funding and i know from uh reading online about this that um that affects your your paid operations manager position which is essential for training volunteers so um i i understand it it is what it is that everyone has had impacts from covet and a decision was made so how do you plan to um chart a path forward from here apps and that funding i mentioned that puts a lot more uh of the fundraising onus on your plate directly it does um yeah it pretty much doubles the fundraising efforts that we need on an annual basis and i only have a single paid employee um excuse me so the that money was basically to pay the benefits and the salary of that individual and yes they do all the training of the volunteers but they also oversee all of the rehabilitative care of the birds and make sure that those birds uh get the care that they need and so um we do have an interim operations manager right now off of some funds that i had raised that i thought i was going to place in another place but they were general support funds so we're using those for this current year uh to be able to pay for an interim position but my goals and and what i've set up are an endowment for at least this position and if i can get this one in doubt then i'm going to try to get an education program manager position in doubt as well um an endowment meaning that the money generates interest enough that it pays for um whatever the need is for for that particular year every year in perpetuity and so you know but it takes quite a bit of money to be able to get enough interest to be able to pay the salary and benefits even for a single person so we're greatly appreciative to the davis community with the davis enterprise story a lot of people reached out to us and donated to us probably in numbers that they wouldn't have donated in the past to us and a lot of it went to the endowment a lot went to general funds and so the ones in general funds are going to help me get through this year but my goal is by our 50th anniversary is to be able to get this position in doubt i'll be fundraising for the medical and rehabilitative care probably for a long time that would be another great endowment to have but for right now my my biggest need is to be able to end out this one position and um we do have an endowment fund uh if you like to donate to us you can find us on facebook instagram and on our website and it will take you to it to show you the different ways that you could help us out all right we've got a graphic up too with your the url for your website which has recently changed and it is california raptor.org and i want to thank you for joining us today i've been speaking with dr michelle hawkins director of the uc davis raptor center i want to tell you um i appreciate your all the work that you do to protect these apex predators of the bird world especially in a heavily agricultural county such as yolo they are very very important to our overall ecosystem to our agricultural system we really can't get by without them so thank you for the work you do and thanks for joining us here today and to our viewers i'm really appreciate it to our viewers you can find many more interviews and programs like this by going to davismedia.org click on the dc tv stands for davis community television icon you can also subscribe to us at youtube at davis media access thanks so much for tuning in and we'll see you next time in the studio