Hit by a southbound semi on I-15 near Jefferson City Saturday, an adult female red-tailed hawk is recuperating in Bozeman partly thanks to the efforts of two Jefferson County Sheriff’s deputies.
After a motorist reported seeing a truck collide with the hawk, Deputy Susan Butz was dispatched to the scene for what she would later explain by email was her first raptor rescue.
After arriving and meeting with the driver that called it in, Butz took the battered but alive buteo and contacted the Montana Raptor Conservation Center in Bozeman, which agreed to take the hawk.
A plan for getting the bird to Bozeman was quickly coordinated: Butz would drive south on Highway 69 to rendezvous with Deputy Dan Haggerty, who would then drive farther south to rendezvous with Becky Kean, the center’s rehabilitation director, who would then take the hawk to Bozeman.
En route to meeting Haggerty, Butz stopped at L&P Grocery in Boulder to get a box for the hawk, which was livening up.
“It definitely got more alert as time went along,” Butz said in her email. “I had to nicely coax it into the box, it was alert enough to bite if it wanted.”
After stopping for gas at Town Pump, Butz drove south on Highway 69 and met Haggerty at the scales north of St. John The Evangelist Catholic Church. Haggerty then drove to the vicinity of Highway 287 and I-90 to hand off the hawk to Kean.
Reached by email later that afternoon, Kean said that the hawk was “in really rough shape,” having suffered a fractured and displaced left shoulder.
“With an injury like that, all we can do is stabilize the fracture and hope for the best,” she wrote. “[There’s] nothing surgically we can do. Her whole torso is bruised and [has] a few open wounds, so she may have internal injuries as well. I am mainly treating her with some fluids and pain meds.”
Despite a veterinarian’s post x-ray assessment that the hawk would likely not fly again, Kean said she was “still going to give her a chance.”
“I will keep that wing stabilized for about three weeks, doing PT once a week and hope for the best,” she wrote. “Fingers crossed.”
Kean called the hawk’s outcome “guarded,” yet noted a missing toe and an old, healed wound over her left eye as evidence of resiliency.
“This girl is tough,” she wrote.
On Monday afternoon the hawk was “hanging in there” and her condition hadn’t changed much since entering the facility’s care, Kean wrote in a follow-up email. She said the hawk’s care regimen comprised fluids, food and pain meds; she hoped the bird would soon start eating on her own to minimize handling and therefore reduce her stress.
“I’m kinda going against what our vet suggested about the little chance that she will fly again,” Kean wrote. “It’s rare that I go against her but I want to give this girl every chance possible.”
Kean again referred to the hawk’s previous injuries, calling her “one badass bird!”
Butz called the incident “a learning experience.”
“It’s not often a bird like that is seen up close,” she wrote.
