Mr. Rogers’ neighborhood
He rehabs the “rulers of the sky” and sets them free

 
By JEREMY LAND

Like to get to meet some of the most amazing birds in the world? Joe Rogers can introduce you.

Rogers, a wildlife biologist and a featured presenter at this year’s Kirtland’s Warbler Festival, can introduce you.

A man whose career revolves around a variety of wild animals, Rogers will present “Rulers of the Sky – Eagles, Hawks and Owls” at the festival, and he’ll bring some of them along for his show.

Rogers chooses to bring birds of prey, he said, because they’re a lot easier to carry than a bear. But a several weeks before the festival, he still wasn’t sure which birds he planned to bring, primarily because of molting. He said he hoped to bring at least six or seven different species with him.

He likes bringing birds that people do not know or understand. For instance, there are eleven types of owls in Michigan, and yet most people can’t name more than one or two.
“It’s a chance to give people an up-close and personal look,” Rogers said, adding that it’s also a great opportunity to show them how they can help improve the environment.

The subjects that Rogers brings with him are birds that have, in his words, flunked out of the rehabilitation program. They are by no means suffering, but for various reasons cannot survive on their own out in the wild. A few months before the festival, Rogers returned to the wild a young eagle that had been rehabilitated. However, the bird did not want to go, so it was recaptured.

The rehab takes place at a facility near Mount Pleasant, where the local law enforcement authorities, the Michigan Department of Natural Resources and other state and federal agencies bring injured animals.

The amount of time it takes for an animal to recover varies widely with the injury. If a bird flies into a window and gets a concussion, the time may be only a couple of days; a glancing blow from a car or a mild poison, perhaps a little less than a week. Other injuries, such as fractured bones or severe muscle damage, could take as long as four to six months.

In the days preceding the Festival, Rogers visits various schools in the C.O.O.R. Intermediate School District, sharing with pupils much of the same information he shares on campus for serious birders.

Rogers is a man devoted to his work. For the past 16 years, he has gone to the Upper Peninsula and over the spring and summer of each year spent as many as 150 nights observing what the birds have done to hunt, communicate, forage for food, and determine what problems they are having.

He has stories from all of his trips. In one, his group went into the forest and stayed for a few hours to watch the birds. They tried to leave in the late afternoon, but were forced to wait until midnight for the snow, which had turned to slush, to re-freeze so they could get out.

And sometimes the critters hunt them.

“Almost every year, we have tents torn apart by bears,” Rogers said.

To learn more about Rogers and his work, visit the worldwide web at http://www.wildliferecovery.org/.