The Alabama Wildlife Center is currently engaged in a long-term research project to investigate a new technique that uses recorded food-begging or alarm calls of juveniles to lure parent raptors back to young that have been displaced from the nest. Preliminary results suggest that this approach can reduce by 50% the number of young raptors requiring rehabilitation. 

A challenge grant of $25,000 grant was awarded to the Alabama Wildlife Center for this project through a joint program of Southern Company, the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation and Sea World/Busch Gardens. to launch a new conservation initiative, The Power of Flight that is providing more than $1 million in on-the-ground habitat conservation and education programs to benefit birds in Georgia, Florida, Alabama, and Mississippi. All of these projects complement the mission of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and several provide direct financial support to refuges or Service programs.

Southern Company launched the Power of Flight with a $300,000 gift to the Foundation; $250,000 of this contribution was matched by the Foundation to create a grant program requiring a 1:1 match from grantees. The Alabama Wildlife Center’s Juvenile Raptor Restoration Project has benefited greatly from this major challenge grant. 

A primary goal of the project was to investigate a technique pioneered by Alabama Wildlife Center Director Anne Miller, which makes use of the tape-recorded calls of nestling and fledgling raptors to attract their parents during the process of returning them to the nest site. The grant made possible a three-year effort to record the calls of common juvenile raptors of the Southeast, using digital recording equipment to make a CD of the calls for distribution to wildlife rehabilitators and other wildlife personnel. 

A second major goal of the grant was to prepare and publish a manual providing detailed information about how to use the recorded calls, along with basic information about reuniting and fostering juvenile raptors.  

To order a copy of Calls of the Wild, Using Recorded Calls & other Tools to Reunite Juvenile and Adult Raptors, contact the NWRA:

NWRA Central Office
National Wildlife Rehabilitators Association
2625 Clearwater Road, Suite 110
St. Cloud, Minnesota  56301
320-230-9920
NWRA@nwrawildlife.org
www.nwrawildlife.org

A third major goal of the project was to develop a gallery of photographs of juvenile raptors of the southeast, showing the birds at all stages of development from hatching to fledging, along with an archive of case histories of birds that have been reunited, or else fostered to other breeding adults.  This material is included in the handbook, but it is being offered here as an on-line archive that will be up-dated annually.

The Alabama Wildlife Center received an additional grant from Southern Company and the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation to continue work on the Juvenile Raptor Restoration Project in 2004.   The Alabama Wildlife Center was also awarded national support for the Juvenile Raptor Restoration Project from the SeaWorld Busch Gardens Conservation Fund.  We wish to extend our sincere thanks to our sponsors, who made this project possible.

Click Here to Enter the Juvenile Raptor Restoration Archives.