Wanting What I Have

By Melissa Hart

A typical training session with Archimedes goes like this: I walk into our nature center’s clinic and cut a chicken breast into chunks, drop them into a box strapped around my waist, pull on a leather glove, and walk down a path to a wood-and-wire enclosure. From his log in one corner, Archimedes opens his black beak and from it emanates a sound like squeaking bicycle brakes. His yellow eyes register the box of chicken and my hand as I place a glistening pink bit on the Astroturf-swathed perch.

I step back and wait.

He ruffles his white feathers and rises, 5-foot wings outstretched, to settle on the perch. “Good work,” I say. He places one foot on my arm, then the other. I thread metal swivels through the leather jesses that encircle his legs like bracelets, then clip them to my glove. We step into the chill of a January day to greet a family visiting from France. They gaze open-mouthed at the bird. The man shifts his eyes to me.

“How did you come to work with owls?” he asks.

I volunteered as a cage cleaner for years at Eugene’s Cascades Raptor Center before it occurred to me to train owls. Volunteers treat birds of prey that have been hit by cars, tangled in barbed wire, illegally raised by humans. Similar centers exist across the country.

My husband discovered our center first—he’d been rehabilitating birds for two years when I met him. Jonathan introduced me to raptors, inspiring me to show up for a weekly four-hour shift spent scrubbing greenish poop from pet carriers and cages. When an enormous white owl arrived and took up residence in our clinic cage, he introduced me.

“Archimedes,” Jonathan said. “A snowy owl. He’ll live here forever.”

Sometimes, a raptor arrives at a rehabilitation center with permanent injuries, but demonstrates a calm demeanor. Then, the director can apply for a permit to keep the bird for educational programs. Archimedes had been raised by people, and thus became developmentally disabled. Believing humans to be of its species, an imprinted raptor will fly down to picnickers in search of food. Perceiving a threat to its territory, it will attack unsuspecting hikers.

In the wilderness, an imprint is doomed.

Snowies can live in the wild for ten years, and in captivity for almost 30. The heaviest owl in North America, they have two predators—wolves and humans. A snowy owl guarding its nest on the tundra will launch its 5-pound body toward threats. “Once, a snowy almost scalped an ornithologist in Canada,” Jonathan told me. “It flew up behind him and grabbed his hair, then gashed his head with its talons.”

He opened the cage door. I leapt backward as Archimedes sailed out and landed on my sneaker. Astride my foot, he flapped his wings and barked. “What’s he doing?” I yelped.

Jonathan regarded the bird calmly. “Unfortunately, he sees your shoe as a potential mate.” Jonathan saw me as a potential mate, and said as much. During our shifts at the center, we cleaned cages and talked about adopting a child from the foster-care system after we married. “It’s a long, complicated process,” our social worker told us of the two-year procedure. “Stay busy.”

Planning our wedding distracted us from the wait. We married on the center’s lawn, attended by volunteers with raptors on the glove. Archimedes was absent. The snowy tolerated humans; however, when trainers put him on their arm, he flew off and hung from their glove, twisting and shrieking like a giant white bat.

“Most birds jump off and try to fly upward,” they explained to me, “then land back on your glove. But snowies are ground-nesters. When they try to fly away, they head down.”

Possibly, Archimedes lacked the muscles to right himself after attempting to fly off the glove. Possibly, he was pissed off at being asked to stand on someone’s arm. Whatever the reason, trainers respected his distress. They left off working with him, and provided him with an outdoor enclosure from which he could observe the world.