Volunteer Newsletter / July 2025

Volunteer Appreciation Party

Please join us for the annual VINS Volunteer Appreciation Party! Scheduled for Sunday Sept 7, 4-6 pm in the August Pavilion, with food, awards, and prizes! RSVP here.

Volunteers by the Hours

Drumroll please…a whopping 10,141 Volunteer hours given in FY 25!! VINS is grateful to the 105 volunteers who contributed 10,141 hours to support the mission of VINS.

CWBRAC	4,410 hours
Education	3,498 hours
Camp	1,338 hours
Buidlings & Grounds	317 hours
Admin/Board	294 hours
Nature Center	68 hours

Education Ambassadors:

Training Milestones

With the beginning of the summer season, begins more frequent outdoor programs and more free-flights with our flighted ambassadors. So far this season we wanted to highlight Paige, our 6 year old female Harris’ Hawk. She has been doing an amazing job flying over audiences as large as 200+ with confidence, which is an impressive feat for her considering she wasn’t always so confident. During one of her first few training sessions she was practicing flights over a small staff audience when she spooked up into a tree and was unable to make her way down. It took her 21 days to make her way back to us, but she (and the staff) recovered and got to work honing her skills and confidence to get her where she is today – flying over audiences and even occasionally through the trees on the canopy walk. While she of course has some more practicing to do, we are all incredibly proud of her progress! 

Highlighted Ambassador

Bloomfield (Red-tailed Hawk)

Brought to CWBR in September 1996 with a fracture to her left humerus likely due to a collision with a powerline in the town of Bloomfield, Vermont. She was a hatch-year bird still in her juvenile plumage (so no red tail!), meaning she had hatched earlier that year and is now 29 years old! Before our ambassadors had official names she was unofficially called “Big Red” by staff and volunteers as she is a very large female with winter weights just over 1400g! She has been a glove ambassador for many years now and is a beloved staple of many onsite programs. 

Raptor Fact

How much do birds weigh? Some numbers from the birds at VINS and two superlatives from across the world! 

• Heaviest VINS Bird: Arizona the Golden Eagle – 5.5 kilograms / 12 pounds
• Lightest VINS Raptor: Ferrisburgh the American Kestrel – 90 grams / 3 ounces
• Lightest VINS Bird: Hazen the American Goldfinch – 13 grams / 0.5 ounces
• Heaviest Bird in the World: Common Ostrich – 104 kilograms / 229 pounds
• Heaviest Bird in the World That Can Fly: Wild Turkey – 13.5 kilograms / 30 pounds
• Lightest Bird in the World: Bee Hummingbird – 2 grams / 0.01 ounces 

Ask the Trainers

How do you weigh the birds? 

When training a new bird, what is the best behavior to start with? At VINS, the behavior we begin with is one the bird will ideally perform first thing in the morning, every day, for the rest of their lives: to sit on a scale and be weighed. 

We weigh the birds for several reasons. The first and foremost is so we can keep track of their basic health. As we know, wild animals often hide illness or injury as a survival strategy, but keeping records of daily weights lets us understand right away if something might be wrong. The second reason we weigh the birds is so we can understand their metabolism–how fast they are burning the calories in the food we give them–to ensure they are getting neither too little food nor too much. 

Most of the birds on the Wildlife Ambassador Programs team have a “target” weight or weight range, which is a weight for which we know that, recently, that bird has been motivated to perform behaviors in exchange for a food reward, and is maintaining a healthy body condition. No one wants to run a marathon after having eaten Thanksgiving dinner, nor would you want to do so if you were extremely, ravenously hungry, and the same is true for the birds. Our birds’ targets fluctuate seasonally, to match their motivation levels and mimic what they would likely experience in the wild. Two of our migratory hawks, Bloomfield the Red-tailed hawk and Northfield the Broad-winged Hawk, gain an additional 12-15% of their bodyweight each fall in preparation for winter, and lose it again in the spring. We want to make sure they’re getting the amount of food that reflects these changing needs.

But what does it look like to train a bird to get on a scale? This is a behavior that is trained through shaping, or rewarding successive approximations of the goal behavior. We set ourselves up for success by gathering the right equipment: a kitchen scale that we have modified to have a comfortable perch attached to it, as well as some “tidbits” or small food rewards. Then, we meet the bird where they are: literally, in their enclosure!

Though a brand-new bird to the ambassador program at VINS may have never seen such a device as the perch-scale before, for most it will still have familiar aspects. The perch is built to look identical to the perches they already have and stand on regularly. We place the scale inside of the enclosure on a stable surface, not close to the bird, but in a spot they can easily access by moving in that direction. Starting out, we then place a tidbit of food on a perch somewhere between the bird and scale, and give them space to move toward it. If the bird chooses to move closer, we will continue placing tidbits on various perches until we have arrived at the perch-scale itself. After many repetitions, we fade out the extra tidbits needed to lure the bird toward the scale, because the bird now understands the end goal, and receives one sizeable reward for the complete behavior. 

These days, nearly all of the education ambassador birds jump to the perch-scale as soon as it is placed in their enclosure, so strong is their history with this object and the behavior of standing on it. This behavior is extremely easy for the bird to perform, too. It does not require them to leave their enclosure, or step onto a human’s gloved hand, or enter a dark, enclosed space like a crate. From the bird’s perspective, they are simply sitting on a slightly different perch. It also happens consistently: at the same time and in the same way every day. 

Most importantly, the birds have free choice whether or not to engage with the behavior. They can always say no, simply by not approaching the scale, and because our birds normally perform this behavior eagerly and fluently, one suddenly refusing to do so actually communicates a lot to us trainers. It is not uncommon for our Barn Owl, Aurora, to not come down to the scale right away. A few minutes later, though, when he has finally coughed up his morning pellet, he’s ready to go!

If you have any specific questions about training, let us know and we can answer your questions in the next newsletter!