Unbeknownst to some Wayland residents, a complex operation is currently in action in the community: the rehabilitation of raptors, songbirds and owls by rehabilitator Allison Webber. When a bird is injured, it often cannot heal on its own and requires outside assistance in order to nurse it back to health, which is where Webber comes in.

Webber is a state and federally licensed bird rehabilitator who received her license in the 1980s and had done work with birds even before that.

“It’s quite involved to get both your state and federal license,” Webber said. “And then, once you do all the requirements, you have to have proper caging, you’re inspected and they issue your state license.”

In order to get a rehabilitator license, a person needs to be approved by both the state and federal government. This process includes volunteering for 1,000 hours, as well as taking a lengthy test.

“The exam covers everything: skunks, possums, mammals, reptiles [and] everything in natural sciences,” Webber said. “You have to know it all to take the test.”

The process of catching an injured bird can be intense and even dangerous, as many larger birds–especially raptors–can have strong talons and be aggressive.

“You really shouldn’t be doing this yourself,” Trained Amateur Ornithologist Joe Giammarco said. “The people who do [rehabilitation] have heavy gloves, heavy blankets they can put over the bird and cages they can put the bird in to try to quiet it down.”

Manmade factors have been proven to be one of the causes of many animal injuries in urban and suburban areas. According to Oxford Academic, “building collisions, and particularly collisions with windows, are a major anthropogenic threat to birds, with rough estimates of between 100 million and one billion birds killed annually in the United States.”

According to All About Birds, natural foliage can be reflected onto a window, creating an optical illusion that lures the bird into it. Intrigued by the prospect of prey, birds will fly straight toward windows, unaware of the potential for dangerous collision. Giammarco notes that this could be avoided by adding elements to windows to stop the reflection of light or remove the illusion of invisibility.

“You can put things on your windows and make it less likely that a bird is going to hit them,” Giammarco said. “Decals or screens over the windows are different kinds of things that we can do to minimize that.”

Collisions aren’t always fatal for birds, but if left alone too long after the collisions, the birds could die.

“One thing I find is that people [who] have a bird hit their window will leave the bird outside, waiting for it to fly off and hoping it just gets better,” Webber said. “Flying is certainly very good, but what if it has an eye injury or a ruptured air sac? [The bird] can fly off with all those injuries and die somewhere. [The bird should] be in a facility for at least 24 to 48 hours to make sure that brain swelling and hemorrhage isn’t in play, so that they can function and get away from predators and eat and do their daily things.”

Another emerging problem is rat poison, which birds can easily ingest.

“I wish people could see what I see: the demise that these animals go through,” Webber said. “People just put out the poison thinking that the mouse eats it, dies instantly and goes away. But if they go outside to die, your cat, dog or anything that eats that mouse is going to ingest [the poison].”

Pesticides are yet another factor that can play a role in injuring and killing birds.

“I have a lot of people call me up with bluebird boxes, watching mum and dad feed the babies and all of a sudden dad’s dead and then mom’s dead,” said Webber. “And they were saying ‘they were just perfectly healthy yesterday, now they’re dead.’ And I said, ‘well, do you or anybody around you spray your trees for insects or weed weed killers or anything?’ And they all say yes, so you’re not aware of what you’re doing. When you’re spraying to kill the bugs, you’re also spraying and killing birds.”

So what would it be like to have to bring a bird in for rehabilitation? Arlington Resident Dima Berdiev went on a journey to save an injured juvenile hawk he found in his backyard. The bird appeared to have a badly-injured left wing and couldn’t fly, so he decided to contact people in his community to find a rehabilitation service.

“Eventually, through a couple of calls, we got there,” Berdiev said. “We talked to a lady in Ipswich who ultimately mentioned [the rehabilitation] website and said there should be somebody in our area, and that led me to Webber.”

Since the hawk could not fly and was not aggressive, Berdiev was able to safely capture it in a box with air holes and brought it to Webber. Webber performed an inspection of the bird and admitted it to Tufts Wildlife Clinic.

“When the animal comes in, and you give them a head-to-toe exam, starting up the head, left eye, right eye left, your right ear, in the mouth, down the throat, left arm, wing, right wing, you just give them a thorough exam,” Webber said.

Sadly, the injury was in the elbow, meaning the bird would never fly again, and it had to be euthanized. Nevertheless, the quick actions of Berdiev and Webber ensured that the bird suffered as little as possible in its last days.

With so many types of birds to focus on, Webber uses several cages and other equipment to help rehabilitate the birds. As the birds develop and heal, they are transferred to different types of caging.

“My cages are built and sized to [the birds’] needs depending on their degree of health,” Webber said. “They start off in a smaller cage, and then graduate to a larger [one], and then a flight cage before being released. [I] have all sorts of medical equipment. I’ve got all sorts of medications, bandaging, microscopes [and] scales. I’m not a licensed vet, so I can’t do surgery. I don’t have an x-ray, but I can do most everything else here.”

For birds that are able to be nursed back to health, the process can range anywhere from a few days to nine months, depending on the severity of the injury. Webber says she tries not to show affection towards the birds in order for them to be smoothly released into the wild– but sometimes the affection comes from the birds, not the rehabilitator.

“I’ve had robins come back the next year and literally land on me or at my feet and ‘chirp, chirp, chirp’ and then off they go,” Webber said. “They just acknowledge that they know me and that they are okay, and off they go. I had [a bird] caged for about seven to eight weeks, and then released it in the yard. Although it wasn’t imprinted on me, it knew who I was. So if it was hungry, it would come and I’d feed it and it would go off again. And then the fall came, it migrated. And the next spring when I was out in the yard, raking leaves, it climbed up my leg and sat on my shoulder.”

Both experts agree that it is important to publicize the rehabilitation system more, since many people are not sure what to do when faced with an injured bird.

“If you don’t know to call fisheries and wildlife, it’s not going to get you too far,” Webber said. “A lot of times people are very upset with me because they’ve had to call 20 people before they find me, and it’s sort of a weak system.”

Many people are unaware of what the rehabilitation system even is, let alone how to find a rehabilitator.

“People aren’t interested in birds,” Giammarco said. “They can still find [a rehabilitator], they can find those numbers online. They can look them up, but it may take some time and you’d have to bounce around a little bit.”

With growing amounts of birds and other wildlife being injured every day, the experts believe it is important to educate the public on options for rehabilitation, as well as the process these animals go through to ensure their safety and lessen their suffering as much as possible. To contact a wildlife rehabilitator, find local options at this link. There is also information on the site with basic instructions for handling an injured animal.

“They all have their own set of behaviors, but they also have their own personalities,” Webber said. “And some of them are more understanding about what goes on when they’re here, [while] others are just wild and scared the whole time. It’s all different degrees of acknowledgement with these guys.”