Sisters students learn about the perilous life of birds

"What kind of birds do you think we can find around Sisters in winter?" Rima Givot, Sisters High School biology teacher, asked her students. To help answer that question, Givot invited Angela Sitz, outreach coordinator for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services (USFWS) office in Bend, to come out and talk to her students about local birds.

Sitz - who lives in the Sisters area and has two young children going to Sisters Elementary School - has worked for the agency for nine years. She brought along three mounted bird specimens to help illustrate her presentation, an adult great horned owl, adult female Cooper's hawk, a rough-legged hawk and a collection of raptor feet, skulls and wings.

The rough-leg was wearing a demonstration U.S. Geological Survey leg band, used to monitor the travels and age of birds. This opened the door to an exchange as to why the rough-legs are here only in winter, and why their summer home is up in the Arctic. She also shared the history of a banded 27-year-old bald eagle.

Angela also told the students how she came to have the three mounted specimens in her office in Bend. While talking about the rough-legged hawk, she showed the students the x-ray taken of the hawk when it first came into the USFWS office. The minute she raised it up for the students to see, the light was just right for Justin Erlandson to see the white spots on the x-ray that he recognized as shotgun pellets. Angela then went on to explain that the hawk was so severely inured by the gunshot wounds that it had to be euthanized.

As the perils facing birds were discussed, Angela shared the fate of the Cooper's hawk that was killed when it struck a window in Sisters. That subject - mortality in birds - led to a discussion of feral and outdoor cats, which account for over nine million birds deaths each year.

The conversation turned to the great horned owl, a bird that isn't known to migrate, but stays put, pretty much, all year. Using this as platform, Angela then introduced the students to the Migratory Bird Act, a federal law that protects all birds, except the house (English) sparrow and European starlings, both - she pointed out - pestiferous alien species to the U.S.

The mounted owl had only one foot, which had the students speculating on how the owl come to lose its right foot, That discussion lead to a question about whether an owl could survive with only one foot. When Angela described the emaciated condition of the owl when it arrived at the her agency's office, the opinion led to the obvious conclusion the owl could not get along on just one foot.

Givot topped off Angela's talk by giving the students the opportunity to select a species of their choice to study, as taken from a bird list assembled by the East Cascade Audubon Society of Bend. The bird unit will continue when Rima takes the students birding into the Trout Creek Study Area, adjacent to the school.