so we're at fact, which is the facility for animal care and treatment we are housed within the environmental studies area of the csu bakersfield campus. behind us we have our display enclosures that are there for the visitors to see. and then we also have a section of our rehab enclosures which are the birds that we're hoping will be released out into the wild. we had her in the lab a couple of days
she came in from an irrigation pipe, like one of those big, three-, four-foot round irrigation pipes. her nest was in the bottom of it, but they flooded it to irrigate the croplands. and then probably later this week she'll go back out to the same area she was found so that she and her mate can find a better place to nest.
basically i'm a student volunteer out at fact. i kind of help clean the birds, feed the birds. we test fly. my time is also spent giving tours and giving educational programs to kids so they can learn about the birds we have and what we do and what to do if they find a bird. i haven't yet been out her for spring
but i heard that it can get pretty chaotic because there's a lot of babies. i think it's fun. they're really cute, even though they can be kind of aggressive and want to bite you. but they're just so fun and it's cool to see them grow up and be able to be there from the time they're little and be able to release them
and know that you were able to help that little bird. we try to release them where they were found so that way they're familiar with the area. a lot of times if we have a farmer bring baby owls that were found on a haystack they they are more than happy to take them back because they help with pest control. i know, you want another one. you're just going to have to wait.
so these two are younger. and they are siblings, which is why they are together. these two came out of a haystack.[owls make hissing sounds] and usually when we get birds out of a haystack there are four or five, not just a couple. so we're not sure if the others were older or they just didn't find them yet. [owls make hissing sounds]
[videographer] the sound they're making is pretty amazing. [marlene] that hissing sound is one of their defensive mechanisms. the advantage to having the mice is when they come in and they're really small they know that's food because that's what their mom's been giving them. so that when they're released they still have that familiarity with 'this is the wild food,' 'this is what i need to go find,'
once they're released. it was found on the side of the road, probably got hit by a car. [donna] it's not even fighting it. [marlene] so it's an adult red tailed hawk that has an injury on its left wing at about the elbow probably in the radius and the ulna, not in the elbow joint. so what we were doing with donna, who's one of our students out here at the facility,
is checking the injury to see if it's something that maybe we can work with to get it to heal so that the bird can be released, which ultimately would be our goal. this bird, though, we're not sure. because there are a couple of bones that look like they're exposed with the injury, and that is something that's very hard to get to heal so that they are releasable.
occasionally the ones that are not releasable do become display birds, which all of our birds that are in our display cages are ones that are injured and cannot be released. so those are the birds that when visitors come for open house, which we have on april 2, those are the birds that visitors will see are ones that have come in injured
and are not releasable.