born with wings

You were born with potential.

You were born with goodness and trust.

You were born with ideals and dreams.

You were born with greatness.

You were born with wings.

-Rumi

Phonetic Planet is delighted to introduce you to a most innovative bird rehabilitation programme, based at The Vermont Institute Of Natural Science, via the perspectives of environmental educators Malerie Muratori and Lexie Smith, as well as a most unusual American Kestrel named Ferrisburgh.

Thank you both for taking the time to participate in this interview! Perhaps I can start by asking you, Malerie, to tell us a little about where you grew up, and some memories you carry with you from your childhood?

Mal: I grew up in Albany, New York, in a suburban town called Loudonville. When I was young the neighborhood was blanketed in a thick deciduous forest; you had to crane your neck to see the crown of the tall poplar trees and these grew among white pine with their whimsically weaving branches. What land developers would call a vacant lot, I called my kingdom, a vast swath of undeveloped land at the end of the street, charted by myself and the other neighborhood kids, and marked in our settlements of forts along the trails. I was lucky to grow up as one of the last generations to grow up outside, I was a child of the outdoors when the outdoors were rapidly diminishing. Between time spent sitting in front of the TV glued to Steve Irwin’s The Crocodile Hunter on Animal Planet, I would burst barefoot into the outdoors and fish for garter snakes under the old stone wall, which I would then evict from their stony hollows and bring home and brandish in front of my mortified mother with a smile just as wide as Steve’s!

Most of the trees in my old neighborhood are gone now. We kids grew up, houses were sold, and I guess the new owners just didn’t see the good in trees anymore. The asphalt seems to glare blindingly bright now. The summer heat gets no reprieve from shadows cast by the trees, and what once felt like shelter beneath those branches now makes the neighborhood feel starkly naked. The only break from blacktop (tarmacadam) now are manicured monoculture lawns.

Part of why I became an environmental educator is to preserve my childhood and share it with today's youth. I want kids to have a third place that isn’t just school or home, a place they can call their own, where summers feel like the opportunity exists for pounding barefoot through the grass until their lungs burn with a tired joy, and their hands are tree bark calloused and their fingers are purple pokeweed stained, and the night sings with crickets and treefrogs, and the fireflies blur into stars.

Both of you are currently based at The Vermont Institute Of Natural Science, although you each explored your own unique route to arrive here. Can you tell us about that?

Lexie: One of the reasons I was so interested in VINS is because of its location. Vermont combines the best of both worlds for me.

I finished my bachelor's degree in May of 2023, receiving a degree in Wildlife Biology with a concentration in Wildlife Rehabilitation from Lees-McRae College (LMC) in North Carolina. Having grown up in Michigan, I greatly missed the cold weather and snow that North Carolina didn’t get. But, from going to school in the Blue Ridge Mountains, I knew I would miss the beauty of the mountain region too. When I was lucky enough to stumble across the position at VINS, I got to move to an area that had both of the things I love, living in the north with snow and cold weather, and the mountains!

It was through this particular degree program that I was introduced to working with birds of prey. LMC has its own onsite wildlife rehab center, the May Wildlife Rehabilitation Center, that students get to work in starting their sophomore year. Under the guidance of the director and on-staff veterinarian, students learn the ins-and-outs of wildlife rehabilitation, hands-on. After an introductory semester to the center, students are then introduced to the team of non-releasable educational ambassadors.

I was placed on the resident Barred Owl. This was the defining moment in my career as an environmental educator and raptor handler. Working with that bird opened my eyes to a whole new career path and love of birds of prey. After graduation I hoped to continue doing environmental education through the use of educational ambassador animals and I found that possibility in the Vermont Institute of Natural Science. I accepted a position with them as the AmeriCorps Environmental Educator. Just two weeks after graduating college, I was off to Vermont to begin my first 5 month contract, after which I was offered to stay for another 11 month contract, which I am serving now.

Mal:  With my natural inclination towards all things wild I first began working with raptors at the age of 14, volunteering at my local wildlife rehabilitator, Whispering Willow Wildcare, and slowly transitioning my way into environmental education. When I held my first raptor on glove, a kestrel named Minerva, I instantaneously fell in love with her fierce wildness and determination. From there on out I became engrossed in the world of raptors.

I spent most of my teenage years in feathered company, raising and learning, experiencing trial and error, and studying how to train non-releasable raptors. In my spare time I grew particularly fond of a fledgling crow, whom in my spare time I taught to paint. While working on a painting as I often did,  I sat the fledgling at my side and he watched.  As a young member of a social species, he soaked my world in like a sponge, learning from me which behaviors to mimic, to my surprise when I handed him a brush, he held it in his beak just as I would in my hand. From there I shaped the behavior, dabbing the brush in paint and handing it to the bird to dash against the canvas. It was there I decided on a name for the young bird, Vincent Van Crow. (Vincent Van Crow has since been renamed from my horrible pun, however I am still to this day very proud of it.) 

I went to School and Paul Smith’s College for Fisheries and Wildlife Science, where I banded the small yet intrepid saw-whet owls on their fall migrations, and the regal rough legged hawk on their winter migration. I did my capstone as a management plan for the grassland dwelling Barn Owl, whose populations and habitat were rapidly dwindling. Naturally when you find yourself in the world of birds, you find your way to VINS, since I was young I had always heard that VINS was the Northeast’s cutting edge of avian rehabilitation and training, so when I saw an opening for that rare full–time position as an Environmental Educator, I seized it. I landed the job just as I finished my first internship out of college at the Trailside Museums and Zoo in Bear Mountain New York.

Can you tell us a little bit about the Institute, and its purpose in the community?

Mal:  VINS is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to motivate individuals and communities to care about the environment. We do this in three different ways, through research, wild bird rehabilitation and education. Their research team partners with institutions along the east coast to cover a vast array of wildlife, from tracking monarch butterflies on their migration to Mexico with stickers placed on their delicate wings, to fitting broadwing hawks with satellite backpacks to monitor their migration to Argentina.

Our rehabilitation department is what VINS is best known for. Our bird hospital can see over 1,000 birds in a single year; we take in anything from the smallest hummingbird to the greatest bald eagle. Birds are brought to us by caring members of the public for a variety of reasons, from little fluff ball nestlings who fall from their nests and might just need a little TLC to grow up wild ready, to birds who collide with windows or cars and maybe have a broken wing and need time to rest and recuperate.

Our goal is to see every bird who comes through our doors make a healthy return back into the wild, where they belong and they can live out their full lives and play a part in their important ecological roles. However return to the wild is not always possible, some injuries and conditions might just be too severe for a bird to make it out in the wild again, with these bird we like to offer what we call a  “career change” to educational ambassadors, where these birds live on site and receive free food, free housing, and free healthcare (everything Bernie Sanders would want them to have) and in exchange these birds act as teachers, doing on site programs as well as outreaches to schools and libraries where we teach people about their importance (and just how cool they are to learn about) because at VINS we believe that the more that people know about the world around them, the more likely they are to care about it.

We are particularly interested in a program there called “Coloring With Kestrels”. Please explain a little about this, and about the special bird (or birds?) who participate.

Mal: I’ve always believed that science and the humanities go hand in hand, communicating science in a meaningful way can be quite the challenge, but art speaks to everyone. I’ve always been an artist as well as a naturalist. There’s something about art that just inspires empathy, by creating something to be perceived by the world you become increasingly aware of others perceptions. Working specifically as a family programs coordinator I often look at what sort of events are trending and I figure out how to put an educational twist on them.

A few years back, paint-and-sips became all the rage, and so at my last internship I took a crack at one. Armed with an array of home-made mocktails, painting kits from Amazon, and Sammy (Trailside’s bald eagle turned model), I hosted a class where I painted her portrait and my class painted along with me, all while I spoke about bald eagles, their natural history, and their incredible conservation success (while occasionally interspersing my monologue with a few painting tips here and there). It was a resounding success, so I brought the program with me to VINS.

Last August we hosted our first paint-and-sip with the same format as my first class with the same degree of success, using our six month old screech owl ambassador, Decatur, who, halfway through the class, decided to lay on his belly and take a little nap. (Our paintings ended up looking like little owl loafs of bread). In the winter I began toying with the idea of having one of our birds create art along with us, our Harris’s hawk Chesterland has a penchant for shredding up newspaper, and so I decided to switch up the paint-and-sip format to a Collage with Chesterland. Much to our dismay (both Chesterland and I), nobody wanted to do that. So it was back to the drawing board.

And it was around this time that a special friend came into your lives, correct?

Mal: Four years ago a bird came through the doors of our rehabilitation clinic, except this bird was different. Ferrisburgh had both his eyes, both his legs, both his wings. He was perfectly fine except for one problem, Ferrisbugh was confused. From his strange behavior puzzle pieces of a story we see play out time and time again began to fall together. Ferris was in the wild once, a young bird either still in the nest or perhaps a fledgling exploring the world for the very first time when a human came upon him. Perhaps they were altruistic, seeing a young bird on his own they may have thought he needed help and just hadn’t known the right thing to do, or perhaps they had seen the adorably naive little bird and intended to keep him as a pet. For whatever reason Ferrisburgh was taken home and reared by humans.

In case this is something you are ever considering doing yourself, allow me to dissuade you! Baby falcons scream, they bite, they poop once every fifteen minutes, they eat strictly bits of chopped up mice, birds and bugs… and having one in your house is totally illegal. Perhaps it was one of these reasons, perhaps Ferris was flying around the house, knocking things over with his wings and shredding the couch cushions with his sharp hooked beak, perhaps his altruistic caretakers saw an adult bird who was primed and ready, for whatever reason ferrisburgh was released back out into the wild. This did not work out well for Ferrisburgh. Ferris is what we call imprinted, a baby kestrel in the wild looks to its parents and associates itself as a member of their species.

But Ferris did not have that, he looked up into the eyes of his human captors, he looked around and saw a living room, and so he came to the logical conclusion that he was not a baby kestrel but a baby human instead, who instead of growing up to hunt crickets and mice, would grow up to work a 9-5 job and pay taxes. And so armed with no knowledge of how to be a kestrel, and a plethora of knowledge on how to beg humans for food, that's what Ferrisburgh did. He landed on the shoulder of a man in Ferrisburgh Vermont and began screaming a loud baby begging call into his ear.

Imprinting is an irreversible process, Ferris is always going to think that he is a little baby human, Ferris is always going to beg for food like a baby Kestrel, even though he is well into adulthood. Because of this Ferris can never return to the wild. He does however make a great educational ambassador, having virtually no fear of humans (umbrellas are a different story), Ferris sits proudly on glove, feathers fluffed, foot tucked comfortably, and is always (always) chattering away. Ferris would also perform flights in front of delighted audiences, popping in and out of nest boxes and soaring glove to glove. Ferris’s story unfortunately did not end there; however, this summer, everything changed.

One morning I found Ferris on the floor of his mew, wing outstretched at an awkward angle, brought into the care of our rehabilitation staff, and later Tufts University it was discovered that Ferris had broken a bone at the tip of his wing, and all the more surprising was that he had an old fracture there as well. Ferris’s wing tip could not be saved, and Ferrisburgh lost his ability to fly. His injury likely goes back to his initial care, whoever found Ferrisburgh likely was ill-equipped to care for a bird of prey, and it is safe to assume most members of the public do not have a freezer full of mice and quail. We do not know what Ferris ate as a chick, I've seen members of the public attempt to feed birds of prey anything from hotdogs, hamburger meat to bread soaked in milk. Ferrisburgh likely did not receive the nutrition he required as a chick and as a consequence his hollow bones might be all the more fragile.

This is why at VINS we always encourage people who find a baby bird that is in need of help to call a wildlife rehabilitator, who will direct them as to just what to do, and most of the time it's as simple as leaving the bird alone because their parents are right nearby keeping an eye on them.

Grounded now permanently, Ferris needed a new occupation. At VINS we offer all of our birds enrichment, toys, puzzles, novel experiences, things to keep their lives from becoming humdrum and engage them in their natural behaviors. For many of our flight ambassadors, daily flights can be both enriching and exercising, but for Ferrisburgh flights are no longer an option.

In search of family programs and a new activity for Ferrisburgh our Americorps seasonal Lexie Smith had an idea. Lexie had been recently inspired by watching her friend and colleague at the American Eagle Foundation paint with their African pied crow, Tuck, and had wanted to try the same with Ferris. Harkened back to my own days of painting with crows we decided to give it a go, unlike the crows however, Ferrisburgh would be doing finger (talon?) painting. Setting up a canvas with paint on the edges, Lexie encouraged Ferris to run across the canvas with mealworms, as a big fan of mealworms, Ferrisburgh took to the activity right away. It was decided then that Ferris would be our guest artist at our next family event, and our medium, crayons and colored pencils. Lexie named the event Coloring with Kestrels. Our event was held in the same format as our previous paint and sips, except this time, while I was sat next to my canvas, drawing Ferrisburgh in oil pastels, Lexie was sat next to Ferris, guiding him across canvases with the promise of mealworms as he trailed colorful footprints. It was a hit. While participants got a good laugh at Ferris’s vigor for mealworms they also learned about Ferrisburgh’s story, and the natural history of his species.

The event had been attended by a reporter from USA today who’s later article on the event launched Ferrisburgh into stardom and kick started his new side gig as an artist. As of now Ferris has been featured in USA today and The Washington Post.  Two of his paintings (one is his first) are currently listed in our online fundraising auction at $800 each.

Lexie: Ferrisburgh is a joy to work with! He was actually the very first bird I got to handle on my first day at VINS. He has a bright personality and is always ready to see us. I love getting to work with him and it’s been a fun opportunity to train him to learn the new skill of painting!

Since we at Phonetic Planet have a special regard for kestrels, we would love to learn a little more about these beautiful birds. What can you tell us about them?

Mal: American Kestrels are North America’s smallest species of falcon, weighing no more than a king size candy bar, but what they lack in size they make up for in grit and determination! As a grassland bird, 80% of a kestrel’s diet is made up of insects. However, they will not balk at the challenge of larger prey, taking small rodents such as mice, moles, and voles. As a member of the falcon family ,the American Kestrel thrives on the hunt for birds, taking down those even as large as himself. When hunting kestrels can engage in a behavior called hovering, where hundreds of feet up in the air they turn to face the direction of the wind, cease their flapping, steady their wings and hold perfectly still and appear almost drone-like while they scan the ground below for prey. 

Their eyesight is eight times greater than that of a human being, which gives them the ability to read the print of a newspaper from across a football field (however most birds are illiterate). Their eyes also have two separate focal points called foveia to help them accurately judge distance, and are accented by two dark stripes of feathers beneath them. These malar strips are a feature of all falcons, and work the same way as the stripes on a cheetah’s face, absorbing sunlight and giving a clearer field of view. Once their choice meal is targeted the kestrel enters what is called a stoop, where they fold their curved wings inward and list forward into a dive. Their cousin the peregrine falcon is world famous for being the fastest animal on the planet, reaching speeds of 242 mph in their stoop, the speed equivalent of an F1 race car. The smaller kestrel can top speeds of 70 mph (which is still speeding on the highway, mind you).

Kestrels come down talons out as talons are the business end of the bird of prey, but sometimes talons aren’t enough when you're hunting prey as large as yourself, so that's when it comes down to teeth, tomial teeth, that is. Birds don’t have teeth, but falcons do have a tomial tooth, a secondary notch at the center of their already pointed beak which they use like a pair of canines. They hunt the same as a jaguar, fitting those two notches right in between the vertebrae of the necks of their prey. They obscure their prey from thieves by spreading their wings over it in a behavior called mantleing, and they keep an eye out behind them with eyes in the backs of their heads! Well, sort of…….They don’t actually have eyes in the backs of their heads but they do have eye spots, yet another feature shared with many big cats. These two spots on the back of their head serve to foil any would-be thief, or potential predator.

As incredible as these feisty little falcons are, their populations are currently on the decline. Here in the northeast part of North America, American Kestrel populations have declined by eighty percent in the last fifty years (along with other grassland species like the barn owl). One reason for their decline is habitat loss and degradation. Here in Vermont a lot of grasslands come in the form of farmlands which are currently being abandoned and growing back into forest, or being developed, mowed over, or turned into parking lots, shopping malls and large scale agricultural facilities.

Another major reason for their decline is the decline of insect populations which make up most of their diet. This can be attributed to the use of pesticides and insecticides, the loss of native flora, and use of artificial lights. To help American kestrels, and other grassland birds I will always recommend the following actions:

●      Avoid using pesticides or insecticides on your property These chemicals do a lot more harm than good and often leech into watersheds causing a host of other issues.

●      Purchase products which are not produced at large-scale agricultural facilities where these chemicals are used, instead opting for organic or locally grown produce.

●      Create a habitat for kestrels, planting native species, mowing less often, and putting up nest boxes. Kestrels are cavity nesters meaning they don’t like to build their own nests, they would instead prefer free real-estate. In the wild, this can come in the form of an old hollowed out tree, but in your yard it could be a nest box. If you live near a field or meadow you can look up guidelines on our website vinsweb.org to determine the perfect placement for your new kestrel home.

Are there any favorite nature-based books from your childhood (either fiction or non-fiction) that you can recommend to young readers?

Mal: I grew up in many fantasy fictional worlds, and a lot of them inspired my affinity for both raptors and the natural world. For any young owl lover (around the age of 10)  I recommend Kathryn Lasky’s The Guardians of Ga’Hoole, which follows the fictional fantasy narrative of a band of owls and stays true to their natural adaptations. Lasky also wrote the series Wolves of the Beyond which I enjoyed as a child as well. While reading Lasky’s works I was also nose deep in Erin Hunter’s Warrior Cat series, which follows the (sometimes gruesome) interactions between colonies of feral cats.

For slightly younger readers I recommend Poppy by Avi, followed later by several sequels. Poppy follows the adventures of a field mouse who lives under the tyrannical rule of a great horned owl named Mr. Ocax.

For readers of all ages and certainly the youngest, I recommend Owl Moon, by Jane Yolen. This is a beautifully written and illustrated picture book detailing what it’s like to go “owling”.

Our sincere thanks to both Malerie and Lexie for taking time out of their busy schedules to chat with us! Ready to learn more about birds of prey, nature rehabilitation and other fascinating aspects of the natural world?

You can find lots of information about the Vermont Institute of Natural Science at

https://vinsweb.org