To plume again

It goes without saying: The Wild Friends department at Best Friends isn’t short on feathers. It’s a good thing, too, because some of the birds in wildlife rehabilitation can use the feathers that naturally fall from the owls, ravens, and hawks under lifetime care at Feathered Friends. Believe it or not, those fallen feathers can potentially help an injured wild bird soar again.

When a wild bird arrives with broken flight feathers, wildlife rehabilitator Carmen Smith sorts through the feathers she’s scavenged from around Feathered Friends. She’s looking for one that has the same rigidity or flexibility, texture, and shaft size as the feathers of the injured bird. With a glue-like solution, she’ll attach that feather to the shaft of the old, broken feather, using a toothpick-sized sliver of bamboo (which happens to have the same flexibility and strength as the shaft) to bridge the two. It’s a technique called imping, something wildlife rehabilitators have learned from falconers. The birds can then fly with these borrowed feathers until molting season comes along, when the old and injured feathers naturally fall out and new ones grow in.

One swift now at Best Friends unfortunately had a couple of broken feathers that couldn’t be imped — neither feather had enough of a shaft remaining to which Carmen could attach a new feather. As a result, she had to pull the shafts out completely, follicles and all, to promote growth of new feathers. But until they grow in completely, the swift has needed some crutches to bear his weight, since full-grown flight feathers generally do the job. Without them, he would end up breaking the fragile new sprouts before they have a chance to develop completely. Thank goodness the few broken feathers Carmen was able to imp will provide the support he needs.

It’s vital that the swift’s feathers are in perfect shape before his release back to the wild, because, like swallows, this bird feeds on bugs while in flight.

“Swifts bank and turn on a dime,” says Carmen. “The flight feathers must be perfect, or else the bird will starve.”

The swift’s new feathers are coming in nicely and he should be good to fly even before they grow to completion, thanks to the tip of a feather provided by a very unlikely fellow also under Carmen’s care: Edgar the raven.

Story by Ted Brewer
Photos by Molly Wald