On a recent Monday, Chandelle Cotter fed a rodent to a male snowy owl named Frost. She doesn’t know much about him, but she does know he likes to talk.
“He’d be a good radio bird,” Cotter said, as Frost squealed a high-pitch sound.
Frost is one of eight “ambassador birds” at the Bird Treatment and Learning Center. He came to the facility last year and can’t be released back into the wild, because he’s used to living with humans. Now, he teaches people about the species, their habitats and how to conserve them.
Cotter has been the education and behavior curator at the south anchorage facility for about five years. The training program looks vastly different than it used to, she said.
“There wasn't a lot of like – ‘We're going to work through this with you to make sure you're comfortable going here and comfortable going into a kennel,'" Cotter said. “It was like, ‘No, I'm just going to pick you up and put you in a kennel.’”
The bird world has seen a major industry shift toward positive reinforcement training in recent years. And around five years ago, Bird TLC overhauled their training program. Staff at Bird TLC say it has helped the wild animals feel comfortable in their human-dominated environment.
Instead of forcing birds into kennels for transporting them to an off-site education program, the birds load themselves, hopping or flying in. Some even open the gates unassisted. Once there, instead of being tethered to a glove, the birds move freely. Staff say educational programs used to last over an hour, but now, they end when the bird signals it’s time to go.
Cotter said this method builds a bank of trust.
“The behavior might be the same on the outside whether I use positive reinforcement or punishment, but what's happening on the inside? Are they responding to me because they actually want to listen and respond, or because they don't have a choice and they're going to feel like they're going to be punished?” Cotter said.
Staff and volunteers said the shift has led to big personality changes in the birds. Along with snowy owls, the facility hosts a magpie, a crow, a peregrine falcon, a great horned owl, a red-tailed hawk and a bald eagle.
Terri Johnson has been volunteering at Bird TLC for two decades, working with multiple bird species. Johnson said she’s especially proud of Culuk, a male bald eagle, originally named Sparky.
For the first several months after arriving at the facility, Johnson would drop his food in Culuk’s pen, then leave.
“Then it was baby steps,” she said. “I would set the food in, go stand by the door, not leave, and he would come and take it, and I did that until he was comfortable.”
Eventually, the two established a connection. It took years of patience, she said. “He’d nibble on my clothes – I would let him do whatever he wanted to gain that trust and to keep it going. It's been four or five years. Now he is the most comfortable bird around all kinds of people,” Johnson said.
Longtime volunteers including Johnson said the training changes have made coming to work more enjoyable and less stressful.
But not everyone was on board at first. Ambassador birds previously lived at the homes of their handlers, and around the same time as the training overhaul, all birds were moved on site, said executive director Laura Atwood.
“I think for some people it was maybe hard to not take that personally, as if it was like, you have been doing something wrong, and that wasn't it. We have learned a better way to train these birds, come along with us and make this change with us,” Atwood said.
The revised training allows people to connect with the birds in a more natural way, she said. Staff say they hope to one day have their birds on display at the facility, like in a zoo, but that it’d take more space and infrastructure.
Atwood says working alongside the birds has increased her connection with local wildlife. She has bird identification apps and keeps tabs on a Magpie family that lives in her front yard.
Cotter, the education curator, is Sugpiaq from Port Alsworth, a small village in southwest Alaska, where she says birds are ingrained in traditional stories. Working with the animals has brought her closer to her culture, she said.
“They were always sort of fascinating to me, but also a little intimidating,” Cotter said. “When I started working with them and seeing their goofy personalities and different things, I really wanted to showcase that.”
