In the face of shrinking coastline, increased development, hurricanes, and economic storms, the small but mighty staff of the Florida Keys Wild Bird Rehabilitation Center is fighting for survival, one bird at a time.
Story by Asher Elbein | Photographs by Michael Adno
Every spring, birds come streaming up to Key Largo. They arrive on the winds that sweep northward across the Caribbean, over the hungry blue. The island appears as a green smear on the horizon, growing with every flap of aching wings; aquamarine shallows broadening, waves that march in marshaled ranks against the crushed coral shores. Then boats, docks, palms, the roar of the highway and the motorists barrelling south toward Islamorada and Key West.
The island is the birds’ first port of call, a place to rest from a tremendously difficult and dangerous journey. Many fall from starvation, exhaustion or injury. Sometimes they die. Sometimes, the people living in South Florida pick them up and bring them to the Florida Keys Wild Bird Rehabilitation Center, a white frame house nestled amid stubby mangroves. Hundreds of birds come through the Wild Bird Center a year: of those that don’t immediately die of their injuries, about 40-60 percent are rehabilitated and released, a rate well above the national average. Those for whom release isn’t an option find a home in enclosures of wood and wire at the sanctuary, looked over by a small, dedicated band of staff and volunteers.
Taking care of wild birds in South Florida is an experience of both hard-won joy and formidable challenges. Between the hurricanes and economic downturns, there’s the constant grinding for funds. There’s the exaltation when you save something beautiful and wild. And there’s the slow horror of knowing that you’ll have to keep doing so, against a backdrop of marching development and rising seas, the future growing like thunderheads on the water, speeding in toward shore. Much environmental writing these days is justifiably concerned with that future. But for the staff of the Wild Bird Center, the present has troubles enough.
I drove down on a hot day in late April 2019, following the Overseas Highway down from the mainland and across golden marshes and stretches of open water, past the mansions and tourist watering holes of Key Largo and into the township of Tavernier. The Wild Bird Center comprises two linked facilities: the Mission Wild Bird hospital and the Laura Quinn Wild Bird Sanctuary. It’s the latter that sits behind a wall of mangroves and an easily missed turnoff into a dusty little parking lot.
Jordan Budnik was waiting for me as I climbed out of the car, a strong-featured woman with a direct gaze and a sunny smile that flashes on whenever she looks at her birds. Budnik is the executive director of the WBC and an old friend of mine: We both grew up wandering the woods and urban creeks of Atlanta and bonded over a mutual love of wildlife. She slipped easily into tour mode as we walked, pointing out each bird, rattling off its name, species and case history.
The WBC got its start as the brainchild of Laura Quinn, a former statistician and amateur wildlife rehabilitator sometimes called — as most rehabbers in small communities are — “The Bird Lady.” Quinn’s growing interest in treating injured animals and returning them to the wild led to a partnership with a local veterinarian named Dr. Robert Foley. At first Quinn rehabilitated birds out of her home, but as her neighbors kept bringing her more animals, she soon ran out of space. Eventually she bought the 5.5 acre property on the coast of the island and installed the two-story white prefabricated house and office, leaving the rest of the land wild. In 1991, the nonprofit sanctuary officially opened under Laura’s direction, with several cages built and non-releasable animals already in residence. Today, Budnik said, the sanctuary contains over 90 birds, representing about 40 species.
Brown and white pelicans and a double-crested cormorant take in some poolside sun at the Pelican Lagoon.
At an enclosure full of small birds, a small bluejay named Flop hung from the wire mesh, uttering an insistent, kittenish mew, poking her beak out at Budnik in hope of treats. (Flop is a bit of an internet celebrity; she imprinted on a human as a nestling and took to mimicking her owner’s cat, to the current delight of visitors.) The inhabitants of the raptor cages seemed content to perch quietly in the shade, out of the sun. Four broad-winged hawks performed some inscrutable negotiation of positioning and perching rights, fluffing their feathers before settling back into stillness; two great horned owls sat like stumps on their perches. A lattice of perching branches is arranged to allow birds with limited flight ability to navigate around their enclosures via foot and beak.
“We try to make enclosures suited to whatever the bird’s disability is,” Budnik said. Some perches are covered in substrate to prevent chafing on bird feet. “We have to figure out what that animal needs in order to have free mobility around their enclosure. Plus, we can go in and change around the perching if we have to.”
A barred owl fluffed up in threat as we approached, clicking his beak in disapproval. Budnik sighed and stepped out of his sightline. “Leo hates me. When we evacuated for Hurricane Irma, I was the one that had to grab him. And barred owls, as a species, are really good at remembering when someone pisses them off.”
The boardwalk wound onward, through a stretch of low scrub, to the seabird enclosures on the coast of the island. In one pen, a sandhill crane stalked over to scrutinize us, one wing drooping. In the Pelican Lagoon — a large, water park-like enclosure of kiddy pools, shade-tarp awnings and a lagoon of pumped-in seawater — big seabirds lounged in the shade, pelicans and cormorants splashing and panting in the heat. The neighboring, heavily planted enclosure contained a raucous clatter of laughing gulls, and shyer creatures like the stilt-legged willet and night heron. Beyond, the coastal forest gave way to the sea.
The thick stands of black mangroves surrounding the enclosures give the WBC an appealingly ramshackle atmosphere, akin to a backyard zoo. In fact, the trees are inextricable from the larger project. Budnik told me the sanctuary is locked into its current size by a conservation easement, which allows the organization to continue operating in the mangrove forest but forbids them from clearing out more vegetation or expanding their footprint. Most of the enclosures have live trees growing through them. The forest guarantees plenty of visiting wildlife. As we walked, ibises and black vultures soared just over the treetops, heads craned down to scrutinize the caged birds. The vultures often come and visit their injured brethren, perching on top of the enclosures like a troop of solemn, silent judges.
“We actually had one break in one time,” Budnik said. We were leaning against a railing, watching the big carrion birds sit dozing behind the wire. The sun beat down through the sparse canopy. “Before we redid them with this kind of sturdy wire, one side was almost like a netting, a little loose … the interns do a live check twice a day, checking to make sure the birds are present, safe, have access to fresh water. They came by the vulture enclosure and noticed that there were five birds instead of four. We had to evict one.”
“How did you know which?”
She smiled. “The one that could fly.”
Aria the Merlin and and a brown pelican find healing in their carefully curated enclosures that allow for limited mobility and safety.
In sixth grade, Budnik saw a flier at her school advertising a volunteer program at Zoo Atlanta. After going through the requisite training, she eventually landed at the zoo’s bird show. That was the first time she held a hawk. She stood there, transfixed and trembling, caught by the intensity of the creature’s stare. "Nothing in my entire life has ever compared to that feeling of holding that animal and looking into its eyes,” Budnik said. “I was like — this is the thing I'm going to chase for the rest of my life."
Budnik began an internship with the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, and followed that up at AWARE (Atlanta Wild Animal Rescue Effort) during her college studies in Milledgeville, Georgia. But she soon ran into a series of snags. A romantic relationship turned abusive, derailing her studies: A four-year course of study ended up taking seven. Finally, in the spring of 2017, she began looking for wildlife-related jobs. The ones she found were seasonal and lo-paying, and required a research background that Budnik didn't have. She almost skipped the posting for an education coordinator at the Florida Keys Wild Bird Sanctuary. But it proved to be precisely what she was looking for. A week after she applied, she got an interview; three days later, she got the job.
“It all happened really, really fast,” Budnik recalled. “May 9 was our travel day, the 10th was when I started working. The weekend before that was graduation, the week before that was when I broke up with the abusive ex, and it was just like bam bam bam. Sometimes life just aligns like that. I uprooted everything. I think everyone has a point like that where opportunity comes knocking, and you can either answer or you can’t. … I think the decision to not do this would have haunted me for the rest of my life.”
Jordan Budnik has been with the Wild Bird Center since the spring of 2017. She had just finished a wildlife internship and was ending an abusive relationship when she took the job. “Sometimes life just aligns like that. I uprooted everything. I think everyone has a point like that where opportunity comes knocking, and you can either answer or you can’t. … I think the decision to not do this would have haunted me for the rest of my life.” She became executive director in September of 2018.
Budnik was coming into an organization that had been having some turmoil of its own. Laura Quinn died in 2010, leaving both a well-respected legacy and serious questions as to the future of the organization. “She gave her entire life to the rehabilitation of birds and other animals,” said Frank Derfler, a member of the WBRC board of directors. “But she did many things literally out of her hip pocket and may not have always conformed to the codes and regulations from the federal, state, local governments and whoever...for example, getting a Pelican that had a hook down his gullet and standing there in front of an old, donated X-ray machine that hadn't been inspected in forever, holding the bird down and punching the X-ray button at the same time, with no protection, no gloves, no lead shield, that kind of thing.”
In 2014, the Mission Wild Bird Hospital was built as a state-of-the-art treatment center for bird patients. But by 2015, tensions between the remaining refuge staff led to a contentious staff turnover, with a long-term bird rehabilitator fired, former staff members given trespass warnings, and thefts the Board insinuated had been carried out as vengeance for firings. Then, the state increased pressure, imposing a $5,500 fine on the sanctuary for a lengthy list of infractions, including the long boardwalk that had been built outside of the 1992 permit and the discharge of untreated pelican wastewater into the lagoon. In the aftermath of these headaches, Derfler said, a new regime on the board attempted to “professionalize.”
“There's been a transformation from living out of your hip pocket, doing things on the fly, to being a highly professional, highly conforming organization,” Derfler said. “We've gone from Laura basically holding sick birds and any kind of a container that she could find to a beautifully orchestrated, neat, clean, and well-regulated facility.”
That facility proved essential in 2017. The year’s hurricane season hit with unusual viciousness, with multiple major storms causing around 3,350 confirmed deaths and at least $294.67 in damages. Florida’s turn came on September 10 with Hurricane Irma, a storm system that laid waste to much of the leeward islands before barrelling toward the coast. Hurricanes are a fact of life in the Keys, and upon finding itself in the line of fire, the Wild Bird Center usually evacuates its birds to other rehabbers outside the storm’s path. But Irma had no reliable path. “There was just one projection map that was just black lines and dots, and I remember looking at it and thinking it looked like the whole state of Florida is covered in spiders,” Budnik said. “There was no sense of security as far as a facility we could move our animals to.”
There was nothing for it, the sanctuary staff decided: all the birds would have to weather the storm in the new hospital, trusting its foot-thick walls of poured concrete. On September 8th, a day before the storm hit, everyone rushed to the sanctuary. The weather was sunny and eerily, unnervingly calm; every car was open and full of crates, everybody was busy moving back and forth, catching and crating the birds. Sharp words rang out over the air. Budnik bundled Leonardo the barred owl unceremoniously into a carrier, earning his undying enmity. A broad-winged hawk grabbing her with a taloned foot, the deep puncture wound putting her into a kind of nauseated shock. Eventually all the crated birds were driven down to the hospital and stowed on high counters, to keep them out of the way of a storm surge. Budnik packed up the sanctuary’s two resident parrots and evacuated to Orlando, a 12 hour drive in gridlock traffic, with two birds screaming the entire way. “It was a nightmare,” she said. “I was trying to find something in the car, anything I could make an earplug out of, anything — it was the hardest drive of my entire life.”
When staff returned to the sanctuary after the hurricane passed, they found it had largely escaped a direct hit: while the storm surge had flooded the parking lot and the wind had dropped a few trees on the enclosures and boardwalk, the structures on the property were still largely in one piece. The work had been worth it: With the animals protected in the bunker-like hospital, the organization hadn’t lost a single bird.
Yet Irma’s damage lingered. While it took only a month and a half to get the infrastructure in the Keys up and running again, Budnik said, the financial damage crept in, slow as saltwater tainting a well. As the year ground on and the fall migration came through, the birds everyone relied on — snowbirds — stayed home. Businesses and nonprofits all throughout the Keys felt the vice tighten, and the Wild Bird Center proved no exception. Without the tourists, the suggested donations at the sanctuary dried up. This was a tremendous blow, Budnik said: during a typical busy season, the donation box brings in several thousand a week, to the tune of perhaps $75,000-$100,000 a year. The annual budget is about $360,000 a year. “So that's a giant chunk of our budget. … We really needed that tourist season to get ourselves truly back on our feet. And [tourists staying away] sank a lot of local businesses.”
In the summer of 2018, with the organization reeling, Budnik, executive director Rob Bulkiewicz and the rest of the board sat down to figure out just how deep a financial hole they were in. It turned out that hole was graveyard deep: a financially savvy board member told them that if they didn't do something fast to stop the bleeding, they were doomed.
"We just pulled out all the stops,” Budnik said. “The director was instructed not to spend anything he didn't have to spend. No projects, no maintenance, anything that wasn't mission essential we didn't touch. If we wanted to rebuild a section of the boardwalk, work on our pelican medical-cage project, or anything like that, we put a hard stop on it. Even down to the type of food for the birds we ordered and when we ordered it. It was a really stressful period. I was instructed to go out and network heavily. Anything I could do."
The response to their efforts was incredible, Budnik said. Some annual donors donated their checks early in order to give the Wild Bird Center more of a financial cushion. Donations flooded in after a plea for help in the newsletter. And then there was a woman who — to everyone’s surprise — left the sanctuary $138,000 in her will. Taken together, it was enough to drag the organization onto somewhat stable footing. When the organization’s executive director departed in September of 2018, the board asked Budnik if she would step up.
That was how, at 26, Budnik became the Wild Bird Center’s executive director, head of a battered organization. Up beyond the Keys, the seasons were turning; at the hospital, the birds were already pouring in.
The actual rehabilitation work gets done at Mission Wild Bird, a mile south of the sanctuary in Tavernier. It’s a handsome little building with a visitor education center, gift shop, and administrative offices. But the hospital occupies most of the building. As we walked through, Budnik pointed out the special rooms for bird patients, each equipped with covered cages and pet carriers, their occupants kept in a soothing darkness. White boards on the walls and folders on the doors kept careful track of patient case histories; the air smelled strongly of disinfectant.
This is the domain of Shylyn Pierce, the refuge’s Wildlife Rehabilitation Manager. Shylyn began working at the preserve in spring of 2017, after interning at South Georgia’s White Oak Conservation Center. Like Budnik, she took a relatively junior position at The Wild Bird Center in 2017 — this time a hospital tech — and rapidly ended up in a more senior position. She oversees most of the intensive rehabilitation, helps train the interns, and works with the staff rehabilitator Emily Buonopane, and with a volunteer vet on most of the cases that come in. “I'm responsible for all of the patients that are at our wild bird hospital and then also all of our non-releasable permanent residents at the wild bird sanctuary,” Pierce told me via a phone interview. “We train our interns to handle most of the bird calls, so our hands are kind of free to do more of the intense rehab work...me and Emily kind of get to do a little bit of everything.”
Shylyn Pierce tends to her patient, a wounded osprey at Mission Wild Bird. Their light weight and hollow bone structure make birds perfectly adapted for flight.
In 2019 the center saw around 980 patients and managed to release 60% of those that weren’t dead on arrival. The release rates are narrow for a reason: Even relatively large birds are surprisingly delicate organisms, with hollow bones and intricate musculature. With medicine and physical therapy in humans, of course, a doctor can communicate directly with the patient about symptoms and treatment. Pierce explained that no such option exists with birds who get stressed when manhandled by animals they consider predators, for reasons that are, to them, inexplicable. In addition, there’s only so long you can keep a bird under treatment before you have to make a hard call: can this animal survive in the wild? Can they live a relatively happy life in captivity? When is it inhumane to try to keep them alive?
“In rehabilitation you're kind of fighting a losing battle, especially when you're working specifically with birds,” Pierce said. “The [average] success rate nationally is only about 30%. And so you go in knowing that the majority of your patients are either going to need to be euthanized or they're going to pass away within the first 48 hours.”
The staff are constantly working against those odds. Patients come in according to roughly seasonal rhythms. Late spring and summer brings young birds, hatchlings that have stumbled out of the nest and fledglings “bird-napped” by well-meaning people who think they need help. (Usually they don’t: their parents feed them for a while out of the nest.) The great seasonal migrations come through beginning in October and March. Birds from as far north as Canada travel down the Eastern Seaboard and down through the Keys before launching out over open ocean, flying over miles and miles of nothingness, and making a return trip in the spring. You can guess at the hardship of the journey just by looking at the birds that come in on the spring migration. Birds reaching the Keys sometimes literally fall out of the sky, their powerful wing muscles emaciated and drained.
“You’ll come across this bird and it's just got nothing left,” Budnik said. “You'll see it with juveniles a lot: usually they just don't have the stamina, or they didn't bulk up enough, or it’s their first run and they just can't handle it. So usually we'll try to get them some TLC, give them some fluids, give the pelicans a little smoothie of fish and vitamins and everything, really bulk them up and then send them on their way.”
Those are the easy cases. Many are harder. Take, for example, the case of “Slash Pelly,” a bird brought in with his lower jaw split clean through the bone and pouch, possibly from a boat propeller. Pierce and her staff had patched up pelicans with torn pouches before, but this was beyond them: their volunteer vet had to cut away the scar tissue, suture the pouch, and insert needles into the beak before binding it with wire like a retainer. “That way, in theory, when his pouch healed, it would pull his beak back together,” Shylyn said. “I believe we had him for three or four months before we were able to release him back into the wild. He luckily was a really good eater, so we didn't have to worry about force feeding him or hand feeding. But that's something we have to take into consideration.”
Work at the sanctuary for long enough and it’s hard to escape a slow and awful sense of scale and scope, Budnik said, the sheer thudding repetition of injuries and causes. Many birds arrive at the hospital suffering the everyday traumas of living in a human-dominated landscape: window-collision, fishing line entanglement, hooks swallowed or buried in wings or legs, dog attack, cat attack, gunshot. Things that most humans never think about kill millions of birds: a 2014 study estimated an annual death toll of between 365 and 988 million, purely from building and window collisions. (During migration season, the staff of the Wild Bird Center encourage people to put up UV reflective decals to deter songbirds from hitting windows.) Between 89 million and 340 million birds die annually in vehicle collisions on U.S. roads like the Overseas Highway, which splits every island in the Florida Keys with a constant stream of murderously heavy, fast-moving metal. A propeller takes a pelican’s beak off; a fishing line entangles a cormorant; a bulldozer knocks over an owl nest; a car smashes a vulture out of the air and leaves it broken on the margin. All of it adds up to an industrial level of pain, dropped on your doorstep every day, forever.
“I think the hardest part is trying to separate it from your personal life,” Pierce said. “It's really easy to, you know, work all day and do all of my paperwork as soon as I get home. So I get home and I sit down and I work for another hour or so, and I'm looking at papers of birds that have for the most part died or been euthanized. Especially in this field, you're not always going to do a perfect job and you can't save every single one. It can wear you out really fast.”
A tricolored heron stalks prey along the edge of a tidal lagoon.
For birds and the people who love them, the present has horrors aplenty. But pull the camera back for a moment and consider the position of the Florida Keys in 2020 and beyond. The existence of a dry Florida is a bit of a geological accident, the result of glaciers locking away vast amounts of seawater during the Ice Ages. Some of that water was released as the world warmed — but not all of it. These days, 90 percent of land in the islands sits five feet or fewer above sea level. Data from the tide gauge at Key West reports a sea level rise of nine inches from 1913 to 2006.
“The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change expects roughly two feet of rise by century’s end,” writes Rising author Elizabeth Rush. “The United Nations predicts three feet. And the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimates an upper limit of six and a half feet.” Even the most conservative estimates of sea level rise by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — 7 inches — eats away at significant chunks of the Keys and South Florida. And the storm surges and flooding created by such a world might reach much, much further.
It’s something everyone working at the sanctuary can’t help but wonder about, Budnik said, even as they race to put out a constant parade of short-term fires. It’s not just about the sea levels, either; it’s about the health of the sea and the islands themselves. “We’re seeing changes in salinity, changes in water temperature growth, and just rampant spread of coral disease and coral bleaching,” Budnik said. That affects the fish species living on the reefs or in the mangroves, which in turn affects the birds that depend on them. Roseate spoonbills, for example, have largely stopped nesting in the Keys, and their populations are moving north. And the cues that birds have traditionally relied upon to time their migrations — the first nip of cold, the first blush of warmth, the cycles that guarantee food supplies will be ready in summer or winter quarters when they arrive — these are slipping out of joint. Migratory birds are arriving too early or too late, further thinning the margins of survival on an already dangerous journey. The warming ocean, the changing of climate, the dissolution of century old cycles — all of it is throwing the ecosystems of South Florida and the world into disarray. Without fairly radical and immediate change, that’s likely to get worse, too.
And yet, there is a certain giddy denial to the magnitude of what’s coming, even a few hours north. When reporter Sarah Miller looked at the real estate market in Miami, a place where the sea level could rise between 1 and 3 feet in the next 30 years, and where the king tides are already bubbling up through the limestone to flood street after street, real estate agents assured her that there was nothing to worry about, that everything was fixed — that as Miller wryly put it, the party could go on. And the party is going on, throughout southern Florida and the Keys. Threats like beachside development, luxury housing, and condos springing up by the water are chewing away the very mangroves that block the storm surges. There’s almost no state funding for parks like Key Largo’s Dagney Johnson Botanical State Park, Budnik said, and the current federal administration is notably hostile to public lands. And still the waters lap at the beach, lapping, lapping. And each year they lap a little higher.
The day before I left, Budnik and I follow the hospital tech, a crowd of curious visitors, and two large pet carriers out to the shoreline beyond the sanctuary. In the shallows, seagrass waves lazily under the sun; a swarm of small fish darts and shimmers around a blue crab the size of a man the size of a big man's fist.
Budnik answers a few questions from the crowd about what to expect. Then without much fanfare the hospital tech opens the first of the carriers. A brown pelican lurches out toward the water, stopping a moment to spread long wings in the sun. It flaps tentatively, feeling out the musculature, keeping a wary eye on the crowd of onlookers. Then it rockets into the air, transformed for a moment into a thing of soaring grace. Fifty yards out it crashes back into the water, dabbling its head in the surf. A moment later the pelican from the second carrier joins it. They sit out there for a time, a pair of black silhouettes, perhaps a bit shocked to find themselves free beneath the great openness of the sky. The visitors on the beach spoke in low voices beneath the wind.
“They’ll hang around a while,” Budnik told me, arcing her chin at the pelicans. “But they’ll go eventually. I think they just like to take it all in.” I left thinking about that. We live in what can feel like hopeless times, of environmental collapse and economic devastation, a world of destroyed forests and bleaching reefs. Yet hope persists. You focus on that which is in front of you, the birds you can save, the people you can teach. And sometimes you are rewarded by watching a thing with feathers float on the rising waves, wings folded as it departs the shore.
A pair of cattle egrets and a warbler rest and recover in their enclosures. The staff has continued to treat injured birds while weathering their latest setback: closures to prevent the spread of COVID-19. (all photos were taken in February before the shutdown)
I followed up with Budnik this month to see how the COVID-19 crisis was affecting the center. The Florida Keys are effectively closed to outside traffic, with law enforcement turning away anyone who tries to enter from the mainland without proof of residence: In Monroe County, there are 77 confirmed cases at the time of this writing, and 3 deaths. The busy tourism of a typical April is gone.
“There are no people here,” Budnik told me over the phone. “It’s just empty.”
As of now, the Wild Bird Center boardwalk and front office is closed to visitors. But the staff is still going out and fetching injured birds and maintaining no-contact drop-offs for people who want to bring in birds they’ve found. Beyond that, they’re doing their best to weather the shutdown.
“If this were to carry on through December 2020 — through loss of boardwalk dollars, fundraising events, outreach dollars — we’d lose about 90K,” Budnik said. “So that’s a concern. But we have enough in reserve that we’re not having to shut down our business or lay anybody off. All of our employees are still on full hours, which is a priority right now. A lot of it’s a waiting game.”
The spring migration, meanwhile, is in full flight.
