Each year, tens of thousands of animals across Minnesota find themselves in the compassionate care of wildlife rehabilitators.

The Raptor Center (TRC) plays a critical role in rehabilitation efforts, so when the Migratory Bird Division of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) was looking for information about the contributions of rehabilitation to conservation, TRC was an obvious partner.

The USFWS reached out to former TRC director Dr. Juli Ponder to commission a report that would identify knowledge gaps and potential tools for improved data collection on the impact of avian wildlife rehabilitation. She worked with Dr. Michelle Willette, senior veterinarian at TRC, and other partners to develop the report.

“We needed to take a systematic look at what the existing research tells us in order to know where to go from here,” Ponder says.

Ponder, Willette, and their team conducted a comprehensive assessment of the published research on post-release outcomes of rehabilitated avian wildlife. What stood out the most was the need for more and better information.

Among the team’s recommendations, standardization of terminology and data collection represent the greatest needs. This data could offer a broader sense of the impact of wildlife rehabilitation and a source of information about ecological red flags with widespread impacts.

One of the challenges is that wildlife rehabilitation in the U.S. is regulated primarily at both the federal and state levels, so processes for permitting and reporting vary widely across the country.

Despite these gaps, a number of studies documented benefits in terms of post-release survival (with significant species variation), along with many indirect benefits.

Read the full story here and find the team’s full report on the USFWS website.