I'm putting this disclaimer here immediately so that people can stop asking every time I post a hawk: no, the hawk isn't stressed. She isn't in pain. She eats like a ravenous beast. Furthermore I'm trained to help with things like this. This is done at a rehab facility, name intentionally left out for my own privacy lol.

This (not so) sweet baby here lost all of her wing feathers in a car strike. She is recovering super well! But feathers, especially on the wing, take a very long time to grow back since they aren't built to shed all of them at once. So, I present to you, a really cool process called "imping":

Those feathers on her wing look really out of place because they are! When the other hawks shed individual feathers, they can be saved as "donor" feathers for a bird like this girl. We have a falconry hawk, so we get feathers from him year-round.

Flight feather shafts are a lot like a straw. They're hollow. So when we get a bird in who is strong like her, we can go through the imping process to help speed up getting her off of the ground. Imping is when we see the shafts of old feathers and can temporarily replace them. You can see she still has a lot of fluff, she's not wounded. We take donor feathers, cut them down to proper length, take a little bamboo stick (super lightweight), and it fits into the shafts of both the donor feather and her missing feather. Epoxy is then used to cement the feather into place! Once she's ready to grow a new feather, the donor feather sheds out perfectly normal and a new feather comes in as if nothing happened.

Obviously she is still missing lots of them, so we can't release her yet. But even with just four new ones, we are seeing super strong process in her ability to right herself when she falls from a perch, and take bigger hops from one perch to another!

Dash and Duchess said:

Ive seen this before! Its such a cool process and its great that yall had some donor feathers to get her started ^^

Versailles said:

Dash and Duchess said:

Ive seen this before! Its such a cool process and its great that yall had some donor feathers to get her started ^^

She's doing really good as of today, too! We should have more room to work on some extra feathers for her in a couple of weeks. :)

Dusk acres said:

Never done or heard of this before, but wow! It's amazing that you're able to do this and help injured hawks recover faster!

Lorelei said:

This is so cool! Learned something new today :)