Those who run the raptor aid station at the Brackendale Art Gallery (BAG) got a surprise on Sunday (June 26) when they received a call about a falcon found at Westway Village in Valleycliffe.
"The call came right in the middle of a concert I was at, so I missed the last half of it, but that's something that you have to do," said Thor Froslev, gallery owner and founder of the aid station for injured birds. "When they call, you have to move right away."
"We got a phone call from somebody in Valleycliffe that there was a falcon sitting at the edge of the pool. So Patricia Heintzman and I jumped in the truck late in the day and drove down there," he said.
Typically the aid station gets calls about wild birds, but when the two saw the bird, they quickly realized the situation wasn't something they were used to handling. The falcon was evidently a tamed bird, but that didn't necessarily make it any easier.
"It had bells on it, a transistor radio, and a leash on its leg. So I went towards it with my gloves on, of course. I approached it really slowly, while talking to it and caught it by the leg. Of course it was a tame bird, but it didn't feel tame. When I got it, it was hacking away and flapping its wings," Froslev said.
Froslev and Heintzman didn't hesitate to put it in the truck and bring it back to their facility and proceed to find out where the bird had come from.
"There was an Ontario phone number on the leg, so when we got home, we left a message that we had this bird," said Froslev. "Then we got a phone call that they had a falcon display on Friday at Grouse Mountain."
The falcon turned out to be an 18-month-old Lanner Lugger hybrid named Twitch. She was bred in captivity for education purposes as part of a program run by the Canadian Raptor Society. Originally from Ontario, Twitch at the moment is part of a demonstration at Grouse Mountain's Birds in Motion series.
While doing a demonstration on Friday, Twitch was caught in a tailwind that saw her unable to return to Grouse Mountain. She wasn't seen for two days until late Sunday evening in Valleycliffe - nearly 100 kilometres as the crow - er, falcon - flies from where she was last seen.
"It's a tame bird so it can't hunt of course, so it was starving. We fed it three mice and it gobbled it down right away," said Froslev.
The falcon's caretakers were ecstatic to see Twitch alive and well when they came to pick her up on Monday. Froslev was just happy to see that everything went smoothly.
"It was all very nice, very clean, people phoned me, we responded right away, got the falcon back here, fed it, and right away they came and picked it up," he said. "It's a matter that the facility is here, so that it's ready to go anytime. We're always ready to respond here at the Brackendale eagle aid station."
