Naturalists locate escaped hawk from Oregon Ridge Nature Center: ‘Tears of joy’

Nearly two months ago, the Oregon Ridge Nature Center lost Stella, their resident partially blind red-tailed hawk, when a falling tree crashed through her enclosure, opening it to the sky above.

After weeks of chasing down fruitless leads, the staff at the nature center had started to lose hope.

But on Sunday, Stella was found — having shed 40% of her body weight and with a divot in her beak – yet found nonetheless.

“There was a lot of tears of joy,” said Jessica Jeannetta, Baltimore County Recreation and Parks’ regional coordinator of nature centers, who helped recover the then 2-pound hawk.

It started with a phone call from a resident in Perry Hall — some 18 miles away from Oregon Ridge by car, on the opposite side of Loch Raven Reservoir. They spotted Stella in their backyard because of the bands on her ankles, Jeannetta said, and, after a Google search revealed Stella’s story, they called the nature center.

When her rescuers arrived, Stella was walking on the ground. And when they set down a snack of dead mice, she soared over to eat, Jeannetta said.

Now, she will spend the next several weeks at the Phoenix Wildlife Center in Baltimore County’s Baldwin, where volunteers will gently but steadily increase her meal sizes back to what she received at Oregon Ridge, said Kathleen Woods, Phoenix’s executive director. For now, she receives a carefully tracked diet of mice filled with fluid, to re-hydrate her, Woods said.

She has been an exciting houseguest at Phoenix, Woods said. That’s because volunteers typically do not speak in front of the animals brought to Phoenix, because many will be released back into the wild, and they do not want them to grow accustomed to human voices — and associate them with food. But Stella will return to her perch at Oregon Ridge.

“With Stella, I open her cage and I say: ‘Hey big girl,’” Woods said. “I know it’s dorky, but it’s kind of fun.”

Accustomed to people because of her educational role at Oregon Ridge, Stella responds to a “tsk tsk” noise, turning her head to look at the person, Woods said.

Woods already knew Stella’s story when she got the call Sunday, and eagerly accepted her to the center for rehabilitation.

“I couldn’t believe it was Stella. I really couldn’t believe it,” Woods said. “I thought it had been a month, so when I found out it was seven weeks, I was like: Woah.”

Several years ago, Stella was hit by a car, and went blind in her right eye. When she was rescued and brought to the Avian Conservation Center of Appalachia in West Virginia, the center discovered that she also had been shot, and still had shrapnel in her body, Jeanetta said.

Stella was badly injured and brought into captivity when she was just a juvenile, so she doesn’t have the hunting skills that a normal hawk her size would possess, Woods said.

When she came into Phoenix, she had dirt on her beak. And the first pellet she produced showed that she’d been eating beetles, evidence that she has trawling the ground for food rather than attacking larger prey.

“She did survive, but she certainly wasn’t thriving,” Jeannetta said.

Baltimore County is rebuilding the Oregon Ridge Nature Center, and Stella’s perch, so she can return after her rehab at Phoenix, Jeannetta said.

For Woods, who has spent 24 years leading Phoenix, much of the time out of her own home, Stella hopefully will be another success story.

Even on the harder days, like with a recent case of a dove that passed away, she treasures her work at the wildlife center, she said.

“I tell folks, nothing bad ever really happens here,” Woods said. “Everybody who comes to the front porch is trying to make a difference for an animal.”