Birds of prey could call museum home

By COLBY FRAZIER — July 11, 2009

In Gabriele Drozdowski’s back yard there’s a small pond with fish, a chicken pen and three wooden structures lined with chicken wire. In any other back yard in America, these rickety-looking structures would be storage sheds for forgotten cans of paint, or a place where bicycles go to rust.

But these sheds are Drozdowski’s aviaries, where Ivan the red-tailed hawk, Cachina, the American kestrel, Tecolita the western screech owl and Max, the great horned owl, live.

Built without foundations, some of the aviaries lean slightly. If they had a prime, it passed long ago, and by the looks of things it’s clear that the end of a nearly two-decade long era at the Drozdowski household, during which time the pond and aviaries have been used to house and rehabilitate countless sea birds, birds of prey and pretty much anything else that flies, is near.

Call it an upgrade.

Soon, Drozdowski’s birds, which she uses for her Eyes in the Sky educational program, will have a permanent, 600-square-feet aviary at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History.

To date, a fundraising effort by the Santa Barbara Audubon Society, which aids Drozdowski’s Eye in the Sky program, has raised nearly $80,000 of the $150,000 needed to build the aviary.

For Drozdowski, who isn’t sure how much longer she’ll be able to live at her current address, and doesn’t have the resources to build new aviaries on her rented property, a permanent home for the birds, is coming together at the perfect time.

“This is the ideal solution,” she said yesterday from inside the aviary where Max, the great horned owl, spends much of his time. “It’s a match made in heaven.”

While building an aviary seems simple enough, the process of finding the birds a new home was anything but.

Dolores Pollock, a board member of the Audubon Society, said Audubon members and museum officials started toying with the idea of building a permanent aviary there about five years ago.

But after settling on a site near the creek, the location was ultimately deemed unsuitable. At that point, Pollock said about $30,000 had been raised.

The money and the idea sat idle until this spring when another site, just behind the museum’s McVey House, where a storage garage currently sits, was chosen. But because the museum is a historical landmark, the city of Santa Barbara’s Historical Landmarks Commission had to approve the aviary, which it did in April, and like that, the fundraising effort was back underway.

“We all would like to see a permanent home for these birds,” Pollock said. “And the Natural History Museum seems to be just the right place for it.”

Although Pollock said the museum has never had a permanent live bird exhibit, it is home to the expansive Dennis M. Power Bird Hall, which opened less than a year ago after undergoing a $1.8 million rehabilitation, and features 500 exhibits.

When complete, the new aviary will house six birds; the four currently living at Drozdowski’s as well as a red-shouldered hawk and a peregrine falcon.

While some of the birds, most notably Max the owl, are well known to many children whose schools have participated in the Eye in the Sky program, the birds have never widely been accessible to the public.

Along with providing new-and-improved digs, Drozdowski says the aviary will ensure everyone gets a chance to learn about the birds, which are all common in Santa Barbara County.

“We’re just going to have a better housing situation and a more public place,” she said.

The one thing Max likely won’t be able to do from the confines of the new aviary is raise his ever-growing flock of baby great horned owls.

Over the last 12 years, Drozdowski said Max has raised 73 baby great horned owls, most of which, for one reason or another, were knocked out of their nests before they could fly.

So in order to have a proper, pre-flight childhood, any baby great horned owl found abandoned between Ventura and Santa Maria usually ends up living for a couple of weeks, or in some cases a few months, with Max.

While under Max’s watch, Drozdowski said the baby owls learn to communicate with their kind. Without an adult owl showing them the ropes, she said many abandoned baby owls grow too tame and are never able to survive in the wild.

Because it would be difficult for such small owls to have constant contact with humans, Drozdowski said when Max in on father duty, he’ll return to her home, where she said a Web cam will stream video of the baby owls and their adopted father to the museum.

Pollock said donations large and small have rolled in over the years, and if $25,000 can be raised by Labor Day, a donor has offered to tack on $10,000 more — amounts that would push the fundraising effort well above the $100,000 level.

But large donors and bird enthusiasts represent only one side of the people who have come to know and love Drozdowski’s birds.

In 2007, a kindergarten class at Ellwood School, which Drozdowski and Max had visited, embarked on an ambitious recycling effort that raised $750 for the aviary.

The kindergartners also drew pictures of Max and wrote messages, which are compiled in a book that Drozdowski says is one of her dearest possessions.

In one message, a child wrote: “Dear Max, I learned that we could help by crushing cans.”

Information on how to donate is available at www.santabarbaraaudubon.org.

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Live animals at museum : 7/11/2009

Looking back from my sixtyeight years I see a red tail hawk in a flight cage located across the creek and to the right of the live local animal collection. I can almost smell the raccoons.As I remember it the SBMNH got out the live animal exhibit,with the exception of the desert tortoise , when the up start SB Zoo came to be.

Brotherkowisaka

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