A New York motorist collected an unexpected hitchhiker last summer—she had more ruffled feathers than most and appeared suddenly from out of nowhere.
On July 12, a Toyota vehicle en route to Saratoga swiped a predatory bird in flight near Kingston, New York. The driver apparently was unaware of what had happened at first. But they probably realized something was wrong, pulled over at a rest stop, and got out, says Cara Huffman, co-founder of North Country Wild Care.
Whatever the driver hit, Huffman says, was now behind the grille and prompted them to immediately call her organization and have the animal rehabilitator on duty at the time, Trish Marki, handle the situation. Two plumes of greyish and white feathers were photographed sticking out of the vehicle’s grille, and the motorist drove all the way to Saratoga before the feathered friend could be freed.
“Trish had them bring it out to [her], not realizing it was still stuck in the grille,” Huffman told The Epoch Times. “They showed up at her place, and then she gently maneuvered it outside of the grille and everything.”
The plumes of feathers turned out to be a female red-tailed hawk.
Marki stabilized the hawk with fluids and medicine. Meanwhile, Huffman was at work at a veterinary clinic, but after her shift she stopped by to pick up the avian patient from Marki and brought the bird home. Huffman keeps a 10- by 10- by 12-foot cage in her backyard where she nurses injured wildlife back to health and rehabilitates them for return into the wild.
“I did my physical exam and realized that [she] had a broken wing,” Huffman said. “So I wrapped it, I took [her] to work the next day, and did the X-ray and saw that it was a fairly simple break for being hit by a car and didn’t need surgery.”
Huffman treated the patient for several months, changing the hawk’s wraps and administering physical therapy to ensure her wing web didn’t shrink and inhibit her flying. Then Huffman removed the wraps.
The red-tailed hawk, whom they named Jersey, recently had her final X-ray and was declared fully mended.
Throughout her healing process, Jersey spent time with another injured female red-tailed hawk who had suffered a broken humerus after also being hit by a car. A Hyundai car had struck her, and so the North Country team called her Hyundai.
Huffman, a nursing major who became passionate about animals and switched careers to help wildlife more than 30 years ago, says birds of prey like barn owls and red-tailed hawks frequently hunt on the side of the road in these parts.
“They’re so intent on going after their food that they don’t realize about the cars,” she says, adding that a barn owl once appeared out of nowhere when she was driving and struck her driver’s side door.
For months now, Huffman has been feeding the two red-tailed hawks frozen rats. She now expects they will soon be ready to be moved to a 50-foot flight cage where rehab staff will begin preparing them for release back into the wild.
But how will Jersey fare in the wild?
“She should be fine,” Huffman told the newspaper. She is confident because Jersey was already in good shape when they found her, at a healthy weight, and successfully hunting on her own.
That’s encouraging.
“They’re going to start migrating,” she said, “so we'll probably just release her in the area, so if she wants to migrate, she can.”
