Volunteer's caring is for the birds

Volunteer's caring is for the birds

U-M art professor is among Friends of Wildlife who tend to injured

■ Part of the joy of tending to young wounded birds is watching them leam how to be birds, says Sherri Smith, such as Young robins learning how to fly.

By TOM ROGERS

NEWS STAFF REPORTER

Sherri Smith takes her liking for animals further than most of us. She’s got an American kestrel, a small falcon often called a sparrow hawk, living in her guest room until it recovers from a fractured shoulder.

Injured ducks and geese, however, go in the basement.

“I like birds and animals a lot,” explained Smith, a professor of art, at the University of Michigan. “It’s really wonderful when you get them back on their feet or when they grow up and you can let them go.”

Smith, whose artistic specialties run to fiber art and textile design, is part of a web of volunteers who rehabilitate injured birds and animals and return them to the wild. Known as Friends of Wildlife, the group is associated with the Humane Society of Huron Valley.

These friends of wildlife have taken on a big task. Smith spent part of last year tending a red-tail hawk with a broken wing, then coaxing the bird to fly through the corridors of a building at the U-M to gain strength. She released the hawk last spring.

“His mate found him right away, i and they flew away,” she said. “I went out a week later and I could see them doing their high acrobatic mating flights.”

She’s got the kestrel now, plus two cedar waxwings. She’s also got a screech owl puppet, part of her preparation for handling the injured young screech owls she expects to receive this spring. The puppet acts as a substitute adult owl and helps the young owls “identify” themselves as owls.

“It’s just terribly interesting watching young birds learn to be real birds,” said Smith, whose physician father also once tended an injured kestrel. “You learn things about their behavior you’d never get to know about, only their mothers would know.”

Young robins learning to fly, for example.

“First they just launch themselves and go splat into the wall. Then they learn to stop under control, and finally to fly.”

NEWS PHOTO • ROBERT CHASE

Sherri Smith holds an American Kestral she is rehabilitating. Smith is one of several wildlife animal rehabilitators working with the Humane Society of Huron Valley.