Video documents release of female Red-tailed Hawk after she recovered from a broken wing. Her recovery took a little over two months and the release occured where she was found.
SUZIE GILBERT grew up in Oyster Bay, New York, and graduated from Columbia School of General Studies. After moving to the Hudson Valley she began working at an animal hospital and bringing home abused and unwanted parrots, which led to volunteer work at a rehabilitation center for birds of prey. She wrote the environmental column Bird’s Eye View (Taconic News Media) and the children’s book Hawk Hill (“the finest natural history title of the year” – Smithsonian’s Notable Books for Children, 1996.) She opened her own non-profit bird rehab organization, Flyaway, Inc., in 2002. Flyaway: How a Wild Bird Rehabber Sought Adventure and Found Her Wings was published in March, 2009.
Through adolescence and into adulthood, Suzie Gilbert struggled to find her calling. But when she took a job working at the animal hospital near her home in New York's Hudson Valley, her passion was born. She began bringing abused and unwanted parrots home and volunteering at a local raptor rehabilitation center, activities she continued for the next eleven years, even as she started a family. Then came the ultimate commitment to her cause: turning her home into Flyaway, Inc., a nonprofit wild bird rehabilitation center.
Gilbert chronicles the years of her chaotic household-cum-bird-hospital with delightful wit, recounting the confusion that ensued as her husband and two young children struggled to live in a house where parrots shrieked Motown songs, nestling robins required food every twenty minutes, and recuperating herons took over the spare bathroom. Gradually, however, the birds came to represent the value of compassion and the importance of pursuing even the most unlikely of dreams.
Often funny, sometimes painful, Gilbert's encounters with these beautiful creatures reveal profound truths not only about animals but also about our own lives—lessons of birth and death, suffering and empathy, holding on and letting go.
Original, lyrical, and highly entertaining, Flyaway will forever change the way you see this amazing member of the animal kingdom.
