In my research for my books, I often have the opportunity to interview those who are actually in the field, making a difference for the animals. Recently, I had the pleasure of talking with Hannah Blanke from the Alaska Raptor Center in Sitka, Alaska. She was kind and welcoming and patiently answered all my questions regarding the care of captive owls. I found her to be so delightful, I wanted to share the experience with her. Meet Hannah! A hero for wildlife.
Me: What made you want to be an avian care specialist?
Hannah: My ornithology class in college, along with the lab section that was literally just bird-watching, introduced me to how fascinating birds are and from then on I was hooked. To me, there’s just something amazing about birds and the variety that exists among the 10,000 different species. I hadn’t actually planned to work with birds outside of a research capacity, but when I left college I landed an environmental education job at a center that had some native wildlife, including birds. We were all assigned birds to train, the core of which involved establishing a bond of trust, so basically spending hours with these animals. And honestly that might be the largest factor of my interest in birds. Because while I’m fascinated by pretty much any animal group (reptiles, amphibians, mammals, birds, insects, ect) I have constant exposure to birds. Any time of year I can step outside and there’s a good chance I’ll either see or hear a bird, something that’s trickier to do with the other animal classes (here in Sitka I’ve seen maybe one frog but we don’t have any land reptiles). And this leads to a constant reminder of just how amazing the animals I’m seeing are, whether it’s the winter survival strategy of a Black-capped Chickadee, or the high intelligence of a Common Raven, or the fantastic courtship dance of the Sandhill Crane. So when I was searching for work about a year ago, I focused on places that had birds and discovered the Alaska Raptor Center was hiring.
What schooling have you had to do it?
I went to University of Wisconsin-Madison and graduated with a Bachelor’s of Science in Wildlife Ecology. However, in a field like this what benefited me more was just the bird handling and training experience I gained at my previous jobs.
What is your daily life like at work?
Our work differs from the winter to the summer, as the summer is when we get lots of visiting cruise ships. But all year-round the first thing we do it put out some education birds. If the weather is nice a couple of them go outside, if it’s too cold they come into our building just to give them a change of pace (visual enrichment). We make sure the birds get “days off” where we don’t bother them other than feeding, but we also have to make sure that our education birds are able to stay stress-free around visitors. Once we decide which birds come out we’ll attend to clinic duties if there are any. Often times it’s just feeding and placing the bird in a new kennel, but sometimes we have to give fluid injections to avoid dehydration or replace bandages. In the summer clinic duty is primarily feeding babies which can be every 15 minutes (for hummingbirds) to every few hours (for raptors). After clinic duties come chores, which are the glamorous part of the job. Cleaning mews of leftovers, pellets, and mutes takes up a good chunk of the morning and once that’s done one of us will prepare diets for the next day. To work in our diet kitchen requires a strong stomach or no sense of smell (me) since we’re gutting rats, mice, quail, and rabbits to feed to our rehab birds as well as our permanent education birds. The eagles and ravens get fish, which is kindly donated to us from a local seafood processor. After chores we devote the rest of our day to training and other projects. For example, we might work on maintaining and altering a bird’s mew, create a lesson plan, or make enrichment toys for the birds (this week’s exciting toy is a dog kong with deer hide wrapped all around). And laundry, there’s always laundry.
The summer routine is very similar, with less time for projects or training as we’re instead spending that time giving programs and talking to visitors.
Do you have a favorite bird and/or animal?
Kind of a cop-out, but I really couldn’t choose just one. The more I learn about the animal world the more my appreciation grows for all these different forms of life and all the different solutions they’ve come up with for surviving.
Do you have a pet of your own?
I’ve had a variety of different pets over the years, but the one I have now is a Ball Python named Monty. I can’t take credit for the name since it was my siblings’ idea as we got Monty when I was only 8. Monty originally started out as a family pet, but as my siblings left home and didn’t have a strong interest is bringing Monty with them, I was happy to keep our snake. Ball Pythons aren’t the most exciting of pets, but Monty is a great cuddler and seems to enjoy soaking in pots of water.
Have you ever had a scary encounter with an animal?
The one that best comes to mind is when I was swarmed by a wasp nest as a kid. They stung me so much my anklebones disappeared on one of my feet. To this day I still get the heebie-jeebies around wasps (also turns out I’m pretty allergic) but, I love petting bumblebees on a cold day. Most of my other scary encounters with animals have all be through domesticated ones. So I was bitten by a dog when I was around 7 (not serious but scary) and have been chased by geese (legitimately terrifying). I’m not really sure why, but growing up my family never really put any notions in my mind that any class of animal was immediately bad or scary. My oldest sibling is terrified of spiders, but I had a 2nd grade teacher who had a tarantula, so I was forever saving my oldest sibling from spiders by carefully putting them outside. Snakes were never an issue thanks to Monty, and living near a marsh meant anything slimy (frogs or salamanders) was something awesome to find when looking under logs at recess.
That’s actually one of my favorite things to see in environmental education. Students who come in with preconceived notions of snakes being bad or cockroaches being gross leaving the class excited to talk about those very animals and how important they are. Because those students didn’t have those viewpoints because of any experience, but because their parents held those thoughts.
Will this be a lifetime career for you?
Maybe. I really like the work I do at the Alaska Raptor Center, but I’m used to doing more exploratory learning so I do occasionally miss walking through the woods teaching preschoolers about trees or animals signs. But I hope that I’ll be lucky enough to have working with animals as a lifetime career.
What do you think is the most important thing people need to know about what you do?
I’d say the most important thing to know is that in an ideal world my job probably wouldn’t exist as it is now, and I’d be ok with that. We have our education birds because they have a non-releasable injury (meaning they wouldn’t survive in the wild if released) and the majority have human-caused injuries. The same goes with the birds we can eventually release, they’re admitted for things like collisions, electrocutions, poisoning, or gunshot wounds. I’m thrilled to be part of an organization that can help get birds back out into the wild where they belong, but if they never got injured in the first place I’d be just as happy.
Anything you’d like to talk about (Or say to my readers) that I haven’t included.
There’s tons of things people can do to help wild birds and http://www.audubon.org is a good place to start for ideas that we can do individually in our homes or in as a whole community.
