PORT TOWNSEND — At the end of a dirt drive off a county road, a compound of neatly designed enclosures sits on 5½ acres, large enough to house 100 birds of all sizes in different stages of medical care.
If you listen closely, you can hear the music from song birds, the screeches of owls and the almost silent flight of eagles.
Twenty-five years ago, Cynthia Daily and her husband, Conner — who retired as Port Townsend police chief in 2015 —began the nonprofit Discovery Bay Raptor Rehabilitation and Education Center, which will host an open house from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday.
Cynthia Daily has been a wildlife rehabilitator for 30 years, beginning her work in New Mexico working at the Rio Grande Zoo in Albuquerque.
“There were many people doing rehab in the area, so we took a break several years ago and decided to come back as a nonprofit focused on one specific thing, with the mission to do that really well,” she said.
Today, the Discovery Bay Wild Bird Rescue at 1014 Parkridge Drive is a bird rehabilitation center. The Port Townsend facility has 30 outdoor enclosures for birds — and one rare feature.
“We have one of the only 100-foot long eagle flight cages to serve the entire state of Washington,” Cynthia said.
Currently two immature bald eagles are being rehabilitated in the enclosure. Conner Daily feeds them frozen mice.
The facility is inspected annually by the state Department of Fish & Wildlife. It receives grants from the state, mostly from money raised through the personalized license plate program which helps fund wildlife projects, Cynthia Daily said.
One of the grants was for a veterinary sink and exam table.
“It serves as a washing table for seabirds,” she said. “If any bird gets oiled, we need to clean them off, get them under hair dryers, and start the process of getting them healthy again.”
And, yes, she uses Dawn dish washing liquid soap.
“The raptors, the seabirds, all of them get washed down with it. It works, just like in the advertisements.”
The center also received a Fish & Wildlife grant for a lead analyzer, an expensive piece of machinery.
“It allows me to check lead poisoning in all the birds, especially raptors, seabirds, swans, ducks, and geese,” she said. “I’ve found a lot of lead toxicosis in eagles.
“If people are out hunting, they leave a carcass, like a rabbit, a duck or a deer. Those types of birds are going to come down and make a meal out of what’s left over, what’s laying there. They are going to ingest the lead.
“For swans, ducks, or geese, they’re dabblers. They are picking up lead sinkers off the bottom of lakes and ponds. If the eagle eats the duck, then they will get lead positioning from the duck.”
Cynthia Daily said lead is in the environment and it will be there forever.
“We jump on the problem right away and identify areas where that bird came from. Maybe there is a problem in that area. We keep the data and it goes into a database.”
On Friday, Daily discussed some of the patients she is caring for. A woodpecker and two Northern Pygmy Owls, a diurnal species, were injured when they were struck by vehicles.
In her specially-designed seabird enclosures were a common murre, cormorant, loon, Buffflehead duck and three Rhinocerous Auklets.
“We created in-ground pools so they can get waterproof again to withstand the cold water in the [Puget] Sound,” she said.
Certain birds cannot be returned to the wild.
The star attraction of the center is Kenadie, a mature golden eagle who Daily said was probably in flight heading north when it was hurt. Golden eagles are not usually found in western Washington.
“This bird was hit by a car off [Highway] 101 near Brinnon, and sustained a head injury,” she said. “We tested him for lead and he had lead toxicosis so we treated him for that.
“After a couple weeks we noticed that his behavior was a little off and that he wasn’t looking at us right. I took him to Dr. Joyce Murphy at Olympic Animal Eye Clinic in Port Hadlock, who is a board certified eye specialist.
“She had to put drops in the eyes to dilate the pupils to see far enough back. He had a detached retina and is unable to see out of his right eye.”
Kenadie will spend the rest of its life in captivity and is now an education bird for the center.
Volunteer Joseph Mollotsky, a student in Port Townsend School District’s OCEAN (Opportunity, Community, Experience, Academics, Navigation) K-12 program, has been working with the eagle for months.
They have developed a special bond based on trust.
“This is unusual behavior for a golden eagle,” Cynthia Daily said. “Most of the time they are hard to manage and have minds of their own.”
Kenadie was named after a Kenadie Stewart, 10, who died in January of a brain tumor when she was 10. She was a fifth grade student at Chimacum Elementary School. Daily said she wanted people to do kind things for each other; naming the eagle after her was a way to honor her legacy.
All the education birds, including Kenadie, will be on display at Saturday’s open house, which will include a tour of some of the rehabilitation areas.
For more information, call 360-379-0802 or see www.discoverybaywildbirdrescue.com.
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Jefferson County Editor/Reporter Jeannie McMacken can be reached at 360-385-2335 or at jmcmacken@peninsuladailynews.com.
An immature bald eagle swoops in to collect a frozen mouse treat in the specially built 100-foot-long flight cage at Discovery Bay Wild Bird Rescue. Two eagles currently share the space. They were abandoned by their parents and were rescued and brought to the center for rehabilitation. The plan is to release them back into the wild. (Jeannie McMacken/Peninsula Daily News)
