Page 47 - Allisons Magazine Issue #91

WHILE WALKING THE HALLS OF A
University of North Carolina at
THE RAPTURE Charlotte campus building late one
evening in 1984, an administrator
encountered an unusual visitor in one
of the elevators. His copassenger
OF RAPTORS buttons (since it didn’t even have
wouldn’t have been able to push the
apposable thumbs).
written by alexa bricker | photography as noted
!e mysterious rider?

A vulture that had escaped from
the Carolina Raptor Recovery and
Rehabilitation Center, which was
founded nearly ten years prior. By the
time this peculiar elevator ride occurred,
the center was already beginning to
outgrow its small corner of the basement
in the UNCC biology building.

Since 1975, ornithology professor Dick
Brown, with the aid of student Deb
Sue Gri"n, had been caring for injured
raptors. !e #rst raptor, dubbed Patient
1, was a broad-winged hawk brought
in to Brown after it was discovered,
injured, in the area around campus.
When word spread of the makeshift
treatment facility, people started
bringing in more birds for care.

FROM ONE TO FIVE HUNDRED
By the early eighties, the Carolina
Raptor Recovery and Rehabilitation
Center (now just Carolina Raptor
Center) was taking in roughly eighty
injured raptors per year—helping to
nurse them back to health and studying
their behaviors as well as environmental
factors that may have led to their
injuries. !e call for expansion was
answered in 1984, when the center
moved to its current grounds at the
Latta Plantation Nature Preserve,
just twenty-#ve minutes outside
© John Huneycutt of Charlotte.

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