September 6, 2024

Some of our cruise mates balked at the $25 admission to the American Bald Eagle Foundation Natural History Museum and Raptor Center in Haines.  The Sitka Raptor Center, which is larger and has more birds, is only $16 but knowing what it costs to run things in Alaska we put up the $50 for the two of us and went in.

The Natural History Museum is a taxidermist’s heaven.  It has stuffed animals from the region, different birds, mammals and fish mounted and placed in a somewhat natural habitat.  They were well displayed but seeing the non-plush version of stuffed animals is not really my thing.  People were taking pictures of them, but I didn’t.  Perhaps it’s because there is no challenge to getting a picture of stationary sow and cub brown bears, no matter how cute the cub.  There is no adrenaline rush at all.  Some of the pictures I have gotten this summer, and particularly some of those I did not get, gave me lots of thrills.

But the interpretation at the museum was very good, and provided good insight into differences between different, for instance, corvids, or species of bear.

But the real draw was the raptors.  There are two eagles an owl, a hawk and some other bids that had been injured and now have homes at the Foundation.  They are used as educational birds to help tell visitors their stories.   

I am interested in rehabilitating animals and sending them back.  I didn’t see facilities for rehabilitation at the center and wondered how they nursed birds back to health and back to the wild.

I remember when the Alaska Raptor Rehabilitation Center started in Sitka. The birds were kept in mews on the Sheldon Jackson College campus.  To build up their strength volunteers staked out a line across the college quad’s lawn, tethered an Eagle to the line and kids from the volunteer pool chased the birds across the lawn until they flew.  Our son Kevin was one of the kids doing the chasing.  Now the Sitka center has flight barns where raptors can practice flight and where vets and volunteers (as well as tourists) can watch them and keep notes on their progress.

The Haines center cannot do that, yet.  They are licensed to take in injured birds, triage, stabilize them and ship them to Sitka for further rehabilitation.  They are licensed to hold birds that can be rehabilitated for up to 72 hours.  The birds they keep have injuries serious enough that they cannot return to the wild.  They are trying to expand their licenses to enable full rehabilitation. That will take some time.  But it is expensive to do even what they do.  While Alaska Airlines helps with transportation from Juneau (or for that matter Anchorage, Sitka gets birds from there too) the first mile from Haines can be tricky.  

This year the Haines center rescued one hatchling that fell from a next and one injured juvenile bird that had a collision.  The stabilized them and sent them to Sitka.  In Sitka they will be released when they are ready and will have to make their way back to Haines themselves. 

And that’s likely.  The Chilkoot River is fed by some hot springs and so has the latest salmon runs in the region so in November thousands of eagles from the whole region gather along the Chilkoot River to feast on the salmon.  Even better for them some of the bears that compete for the feast have already gone to den.

We had a nice chat with folks at the center.  For us it was $50 well spent.

I enjoyed some of the plants at the Eagle center.

The Totem poles were designed and carved under the direction of Jim Heaton.  The main design is a killer whale. Other designs represent some of the birds rescued by the center.