Gary Landers is an 'Everyday Hero'

If hundreds of injured hawks, eagles and owls now enjoying good health and freedom of flight today could talk, they could tell why Gary Landers is an "everyday hero."

Since they can't, the Kiwanis Club of Sisters bestowed the honor on their behalf.

From time to time the Sisters Kiwanis Club asks its members for nominations for the award, which is presented to someone who does tasks within the Sisters community without being asked, does it for no personal gain, and "just gets it done."

The Kiwanians feel these acts should not go unnoticed. Club President Jeff Omodt, and nominator Karen Keady thought that way, and so did the 45-plus members in attendance at the Kiwanis meeting at Brand 33 at Aspen Lakes.

Every day, the phone rings at Landers' facility with a report of another hawk, owl or eagle in some kind of trouble. It could be an owl caught up in a barbed-wire fence, an eagle down with a severe case of lead-poisoning, or one that's been electrocuted or shot. Landers never hesitates to respond.

The government offers no funding for this project. Landers does it on his own; it's what he wants to do, and he sees the need in the community.

Landers is also an educator.

He has an injured great horned owl named Marly who had such a serious injury to its wing that it couldn't be released back to the wild. But Marly was so healthy in so many other ways, Gary trained him to become an "education bird." In that role, he goes visiting to the classrooms of the Sisters, Bend and Redmond schools, and the COCC and OSU campuses.

Gary has him playing another role that's also vital: foster parent.

In the spring, Landers is the recipient of several baby great horned owls that are found on the ground and out-of-the-nest for one reason or another. Most of the time, if the person who discovered the owl would place it back in the tree under which it was found, everything would work out well; mom and dad would find it, coax it off somewhere safer, and help it grow to an

adult.

But all too often the baby owls end up at Wild Wings - and that's when Landers sets up Marly as a foster parent. He has a mouse-proof corral in the flight cage where he keeps the owls. At feeding time, he drops live mice in the corral, lets nature take its course and without any human contact the fledgling owls learn to become owls and are soon released back into the area they were

found.

It's that kind of work that earns Gary Landers the title, "Everyday Hero."