💎 The birds that rule the skies

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You know those places you've always meant to visit — the ones that have been around for years but rarely make headlines? They remind us of our history — good and bad — our remarkable achievements, the glories of nature, and, sometimes, they make us look at ourselves in new and occasionally weird ways.

In this series, longtime Charlotte arts critic Lawrence Toppman visits five overlooked Mecklenburg County destinations that deserve a spot on your summer itinerary.

by Lawrence Toppman

I’ll start with three favorite things I learned during my afternoon at Carolina Raptor Center.

Wait a minute — Saker falcons inhabit Asia, Europe and parts of northern Africa. Andean condors live in South America. What happened to all the local birds I saw the last time I visited the CRC, more years ago than I care to count? Isn’t it a sanctuary for Cooper’s hawks, turkey vultures and other creatures from Mecklenburg County’s skies?

Yes and no. The center still rehabilitates raptors of all sorts; it will see its 28,000th patient sometime this year, and almost two-thirds of those are our most common neighbors: barred owls, red-shouldered hawks and red-tailed hawks.

Yet it now has an international footprint, accepting birds for display that cannot be sent back to the wild because of imprinting or permanent injuries. So a stroll along its three-quarter-mile nature trail provides such surprises as the shy, massive Eurasian Eagle-Owl, which ranges from France to China.

No visitor can catch all the CRC’s programs in the same day. The entertaining “Bird Show,” where raptors come out to a training circle for audiences to watch at relatively close distances, runs Wednesdays through Saturdays at 1 p.m. The “Meet a Raptor” encounter happens on Saturdays and Sundays at 11 a.m. My top priority this time was the “Behind the Scenes Hospital Tour,” which requires advance tickets and happens only on Sundays and Mondays at 1 p.m.

You don’t find doctors working on birds; patients are frightened enough without having strangers gawp at them during surgery. But you get a comprehensive walk-through of the small but efficiently designed medical center, from a look at the place where dehydrated fliers receive subcutaneous fluids to the radiology room, where I saw an X-ray of a black vulture with eight pellet wounds. (He healed nicely. Federal law prohibits shooting raptors, but dimwits persist.)

The CRC maintains a network of volunteers who fetch injured birds if rescuers don’t trust themselves to transport patients. The staff does everything from setting a fracture with a metal pin to halving a dead mouse and inserting medication for a hard-to-pill patient. I especially liked “imping,” where birds with damaged wing feathers get implants from the same species that last until they molt naturally.

Outside the hospital, in a glade cooled by countless trees, about 30 birds live in permanent enclosures. The ones who eat songbirds can surely hear their prey chirping in the forest, and North Carolina raptors hear an occasional screech from one of their own species flying free. Yet they seem calm enough in wire cages, inscrutably studying humans passing by.

Three things define a raptor: They’re carnivores, they hunt and eat on land, and they come from the same common ancestors. A chart at the center traces them back to Telluraves, which means you could have a raptor in your home: One family descended from that line includes parrots.

Raptors can be terrifying, even in small packages: The peregrine falcon dives at speeds over 200 mph and stuns prey by knocking it out of the air. The common raven, a stocky, thick-necked bird with a husky caw, might be a hawk dipped in soot. Yet the red-legged seriema steps daintily on long thin legs, like some kind of crested crane. You wouldn’t guess it kills poisonous coral snakes in its native Amazon, slamming them to the ground and eating them.

Even keepers can’t say exactly why birds respond as they do. Gilbert, the great horned owl, did a side-to-side dance on his perch and emitted babylike squeaks when a staffer approached. He’s imprinted on humans, so perhaps he thought he was greeting another owl. He may have been triangulating sound — owls’ ears sit at non-symmetrical angles to help them do that — and working out what was happening. Perhaps he was just excited to get his once-a-day mouse.

Despite superstition, negative depictions for hundreds of years and physical characteristics one might call ugly — featherless face, naked bobbing neck, ungainly body when earthbound — vultures remain my favorite CRC residents. (Would you want feathers around your face if you stuck it into carrion?)

They perform a service for humanity, clearing off dead animals and preventing the spread of disease. One study showed that, when Indian vultures died off in the 1990s after eating cattle treated with an anti-inflammatory drug, half a million human deaths followed over five years.

When threatened, they prefer not to fight; instead, they puke on whoever’s bothering them. Most birds can’t smell, which refutes the old wives’ tale that touching a baby bird prevents its parents from tending it. But turkey vultures smell death, sometimes before it happens — dying bodies emit gases — so black vultures follow them to corpses they can’t detect themselves. 

Unfortunately, they often bully turkey vultures and seize the larger share of the remains. How human of them!

Lawrence Toppman covered the arts for 40 years at The Charlotte Observer before retiring in 2020. Now, he’s back in the critic’s chair for The Charlotte Ledger’s Toppman on the Arts newsletter.

Here’s a hint: It’s an architectural landmark on North Tryon Street.