who will be a perfect education bird, there is no point in keeping one that can’t fly or hunt again. You learn how to let go and move on very quickly, and just put your energy into the next one.
On the other hand, we have personal experience that raptors are a great deal tougher than it might appear. We’ve successfully released one-eyed hawks, who learn to compensate for their lack of binocular vision very well. Birds with one “bad” leg learn to strike only with the good one. One-eyed owls are routine for us now; owls mostly hunt by sound anyway and don’t actually need both eyes. But the most amazing is that another rehabber in our area has routinely gotten successful releases with owls that are minus a wingtip; evidently owls are such strong fliers that they don’t need their entire wingspan to prosper, and that is quite amazing and heartening.
We’ve learned other things, too; one of the oddest is that owls by-and-large don’t show gradual recovery from head-injuries. They will go on, day after day, with nothing changing—then, suddenly, one morning you have an owl fighting to get out of the box you’ve put him in to keep him quiet and contained! We’ve learned that once birds learn to hunt, they prefer fresh-caught dinner to the frozen stuff we offer; we haven’t had a single freeloader keep coming back long after he should be independent. We’ve learned that “our” birds learn quickly not to generalize about humans feeding them—once they are free-flying (but still supplementing their hunting with handouts) they don’t bother begging for food from anyone but those who give them the proper