Raptor Specialist

Name: Trish Nixon
Age: 53
Job: Raptor Specialist at The Peregrine Fund's World Center for Birds of Prey

The Peregrine Fund in Boise, Idaho is a nonprofit organization that breeds endangered birds of prey around the world and releases them back into the wild. Named for the Peregrine Falcon it helped save from extinction, the center now breeds the endangered Aplomado Falcon and California Condor.

What does a raptor specialist do?
Raptor is just another word for bird of prey. My job focuses on the care, feeding, training and educating about the birds of prey that we have here in the education program. We have a visitor center and people come and learn about birds of prey and why they're important to our environment. I do flight demonstrations for the general public, too.

Describe your daily activities.
First thing, you do a headcount and make sure everybody looks good. Birds fly best when they're at a certain weight, so I weigh them in the morning and make a note of whether they're over or underweight. Some birds need their talons and their beaks trimmed. I'll clean their chambers, or their perches. Every hour we have a bird presentation which involves sitting in the theater and talking with people about whatever bird you happen to have on your glove.

How do you get them to swoop and land on your glove?
You have to have some strong muscles, depending on what kind of birds you're flying. They come and land on your arm and you feed them a tidbit of food.

Sounds amazing.
We have a Harpy Eagle that we fly and this bird's got 1,000 pounds of pressure per square inch in its feet and talons. They hunt monkeys and sloths in the rainforest. To have that guy come and fly and land on your glove and be inches from you while you're holding it is one of the coolest. I never get sick of it and I've been here 11 years, and there isn't a day that doesn't go by that I don't think, "God, I've got the coolest job in the world."

So, the Harpy Eagle knows not to grab your arm too hard?
Uh, usually. [Laughing]

Have you ever been hurt working with the birds?
Yeah, sure. I've got my scars and my interesting marks, but that goes with the territory. But I've had very few injuries considering the amount of time I've been working with them.

Do those occur by accident?
Sometimes by accident, and sometimes on purpose if somebody's irked and they just decide to snap at you with their talons. [Laughs.]


How do you do the flight demonstrations?
When we take them outside and fly them. Because falcons chase things on the wing, the best way to get them to show their flight ability is to take a lure on the end of a long string and swing it. These birds dive and swoop after it. The first few times I did that, I thought, I can't believe that I'm on one end of this rope and I've got a Peregrine Falcon flying after it on the other end. They will get up so high you can't see them, then come speeding down out of the sky or they'll go just out of range over the horizon the bird will look like they're flying away and all of a sudden they'll come popping back up over the hill, skimming real low across the sage brush then hit the lure with their feet. It's like being part of nature.

What if the birds fly away?
They could if they wanted to. But we've got telemetry on them if one of them decided to fly away. But part of the cool thing about training them is working with them so they know if they come back they get a nice big meal and they get their exercise and they get the best of both worlds.

What is a bird of prey?
Birds that hunt for their food; that eat meat. They have huge eyes and outstanding vision, which is what gives them the ability to see their prey from as high as three-quarters of a mile up in the sky.

Do they only eat meat?
Yup.

What do you feed the birds at your center?
It depends on what they are and their natural inclinations in the wild. Peregrine Falcons hunt mainly other birds, so they have the ability to dive at over 250 miles an hour so they can out-maneuver and out-fly their prey. We raise Coturnix quail here and the Peregrine Falcons eat primarily quail meat.

How do you feed the quail meat to the falcons?
We take off the parts they're not going to eat like the wings and feet, but it's important for the birds to ingest bone, skin and feathers and hair because their whole system is meant to operate correctly when they get the food just the way it would be in the wild. There's nobody in the wild to clean it up for them and remove the bones for them like we would if we were eating the meat. So they get their calcium from the bone and their roughage from the feathers and skin. Their body is very efficient at making the most of what they eat into food and converting it into energy. So they don't have to hunt every single day.

How often do you feed the birds?
Most of the birds at our education center get fed once a day, except for the really small ones with the high metabolic rates like the American Kestrel. Because they're a really small bird that actually weighs less than a cell phone, they burn their energy up so quickly we have to feed them two or three times a day.

The American Kestrel is so tiny; what do they prey on?
In the wild, they eat a lot of insects, small rodents and little lizards and occasionally little snakes. In captivity we give them some mice. We buy crickets for them occasionally, or give them a piece of quail meat.

How many different types of birds of prey are there?
In the world? [Laughs.] Thousands.

Which birds of prey do you work with?
We work with birds whose numbers are diminishing or whose environments are in danger.

What kind of birds do you have at your education center?
Let's see...the Aplomado Falcon and California Condor, a turkey vulture, five different varieties of eagles, four different varieties of falcons, an owl, and three different varieties of hawks.

Why are birds of prey important to the environment?
Well, several reasons. Number one is they help keep things in balance. Any kind of predatory animal is going to help keep things that have a tendency to overpopulate like insects or rodents or snakes in check. It's a system of checks and balances, sort of. If you take a predator out of the equation, the things that they hunt are going to over populate and then there won't be enough food for them, so they fit into that cog. Another very important feature about raptors is because they're at the top of their food chain, whatever happens to them is eventually going to happen to us because we're also at the top of our food chain.

What got you interested in birds of prey?
I have been interested in birds since I was as little kid. I got yelled at a lot in school because instead of paying attention to my math teacher, I was staring out the window at birds.

What kind of educational background do you need to be a Raptor Specialist?
Well, I kind of came into it in a circuitous way. I started volunteering in high school with an organization that did rehabilitation of injured birds. I worked with birds for 10 or 12 years on a volunteer basis. I was a professional artist, but I found out that I enjoyed what I did for a hobby more than I enjoyed what I did for a living, so when I moved to Idaho, I looked up The Peregrine Fund and was fortunate enough after a while to land the job I've got now.

How do you like your job?
It's my dream job. I can't imagine not having this job. It's way more than a job to me. I get up in the morning and can't wait to get to work. I very often call in on my days off to see how the birds are doing. It's not unusual for me to stop in to work to take one of the birds out and fly them or work with them in their chambers. Or just come up and visit them. They are such awesome animals to hang around with because of the way they're designed, their intelligence, how they're all designed to fit into their little niche in the wild.

How long have you been working at The Peregrine Fund?
I'm going on my eleventh year. My dad used to always say, "You're not going to get a job playing with birds," which I think is pretty funny because that's pretty much what I do now.

Is that how you think of your job --- playing with birds?
It's a lot of work, but if you love what you do, it doesn't seem like work.

What about the pay? Is that important to you?
Being happy at what you do and having a passion for what you do, to me, is worth way more than any paycheck. I don't make a bad living. I'm working for a non-profit, so it goes without saying that I'm certainly not going to get rich, but when I'm an old 80 year-old woman talking about my birds I think I will look back more fondly on these memories than if I were looking at a couple of hundred dollar bills in my hand.

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Tags: birds-of-prey, raptors