by Danny Siegel
Printed with permission of the author
Sigrid Ueblacker repairs eagles. And hawks and owls and falcons and other birds of prey. There have been a couple of thousand she has taken care of since 1981, nearly all of them victims of gunshots or traps or poisons or other unfortunate encounters with human beings.
Some of them get well enough to return to the wild; others can never go back. Some have to be taken care of in her Intensive Care Unit (ICU), and others need relatively less dramatic attention:
Basic veterinary care, good food, and a huge cage to practice flying again. And of course, constant human care. They’ve even flown eagles down to her from Alaska to take care of. I saw seven or eight Golden Eagles and one Bald Eagle when I was at her Birds of Prey Foundation (BOP) project ouside of Denver. One of them was no more than a foot away from me in the ICU when I looked into the cage.
Magnificent birds.
A giant repair show, with cages built with the help of volunteers that are 10 or 20 or 50 times larger than I would have ever imagined, because the birds need huge spaces to really fly better, to get stronger, to imitate the distances they will need when they go back to their real home.
But BOP isn’t just another repair shop for raptors. (That’s one of those College Board words. It means birds of prey.) The secret, if there is one, is that Sigrid seems to not only know everything there needs to be known about taking care of these birds, but she also is a thinker, a creative, insightful person willing to risk things, to try out new approaches, to make breakthroughs. To use the hackneyed phrase, she is “on the cutting edge” of this field.
I suppose she is a fanatic, but she is a low-key fanatic. She didn’t scream of the injustices of human beings towards their environment, nor about the cruelties and stupidities of poisons and shotguns. She knows her stuff, and she is slowly winning her battles because of the way she does things.
Sigrid gives each bird a name: Ludwig Leucocephalus (a bald eagle, the second name meaning “white-headed”), Amadeus, Papageno, Ajax, Myranda, Othelia, Stripes, Kabab, to mention a few. But they are not her pets; she doesn’t want to own them. For Sigrid, “owning” these birds means sending them back into God’s Country to live their lives in the wild. There they can be wild once again, Genesis/Garden of Eden-like, as they were meant to be.
Sigrid’s newsletter is called “The WindWalker.”
What must it be like to walk on the wind? The photographs alone, even without accompanying text, are very moving.
But it is the birds themselves — how do you describe them, their magnificence, this majesty they wear with such natural dignity? There’s a picture in another article I have about Sigrid. In that photograph, she is holding (cradling?) an eagle in her arms, some wounded eagle that was sent her way.
I think that is a more complete picture, one that communicates magnificence and majesty much more: a human being respecting this world, awed by the wonder of it all, and working long, hard, painful, and often dirty hours to keep it wondrous, and majestic.
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