Helping Wildlife in Spring
Baby animals may – or may not – need your help this spring. Here’s what you should do.
Center for Wild Bird Rehab -Looking Back on 2020
VINS Center for Wild Bird Rehabilitation has experienced its busiest year yet, receiving a total of 1,025 patients.
It’s Raining Birds
Summers in the Center for Wild Bird Rehabilitation (CWBR) can best be described as chaotically busy.
CWBR staff receive upwards of 30 phone calls a day regarding injured wildlife across New England, all while caring for countless critical care patients in the ICU, receiving and examining between 5-15 new patients a day, and feeding baby birds every half hour from 6am to 8pm. Summer 2020 could also be described as such, but on a much greater scale.
2019 at the Center for Wild Bird Rehabilitation
It has certainly been a busy year! Many may remember that our intake total was a record-breaking 652 patients in 2018. But move over, 2018 – the VINS Center for Wild Bird Rehabilitation received 705 total patients in 2019.
NestWatch Season Wrap-Up 2019
I am often floored by how quickly the seasons go by, from our brief spring in Vermont, to the flurry of autumn colors. But what I find even more impressive is the speed of the full nesting cycle of our native songbirds.
Ogden’s Egg
It’s been a hectic spring at VINS. The Center for Wild Bird Rehabilitation’s ongoing renovations meant we have had to move some of our education birds from their accustomed aviaries to other enclosures temporarily. Change can be stressful, so we were closely monitoring the behavior of our oldest, most “entrenched” resident, a 38-year-old Turkey Vulture named Ogden.
Erie the Northern Harrier
VINS is excited to announce our newest raptor ambassador, “Erie,” a female Northern Harrier! Erie can be found on exhibit with our male harrier, “Freedom”. They are quite the pair and provide a great opportunity to see how strikingly different male and female harriers are from one another, as one of the few raptors with different plumages between the genders.
Project FeederWatch Season Summary
Another season of the citizen science program, Project FeederWatch is behind us, and it was a very big winter! Now in its 32nd year, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s winter bird-watching project aims to connect people with the wildlife in their backyards, and with the world of scientific research.
Spring Brings River Otter Pups
by Karen Ruth RichardsonVINS Volunteer One morning, a January dawn, I walked the VINS trails before my volunteer shift. I turned on a trail which ran alongside the icy river. I heard a crack in the ice. I crouched down and held still. This was the crepuscular time of day (at dawn) when many mammals…
Don’t Feed That Owl!
by Bren LundborgWildlife Keeper In the midst of an early March snowstorm, we received yet another bird that many of you have probably been seeing in high numbers: a Barred Owl. While they are normally a common patient of ours, this winter we have been receiving greater numbers than usual coming in for treatment (as…
