is one of the worlds leading teaching and research hospitals for wildlife and conservation medicine, providing state-of-the-art veterinary care for more than 3000 wild animals each year.

The Center of draws on lessons learned from each patient admitted, to teach the world to care about and care for, wildlife and the environment.

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(water running and birds chirping) (upbeat music) >>Across the United States, there are literally thousands of people involved in the field of wildlife rehabilitation.

Now, what is wildlife rehabilitation?

Well, the definition is, it's the temporary care and confinement of injured, orphaned, disease or displaced wildlife that are in captivity in need of care to be restored to good health, so they can be returned to the wild, able to function normally in a natural environment.

That able to function normally is a critical part of the criteria for release.

Now of the half million or so animals that come into care of wildlife rehabilitators across the United States every year, obviously, not all of them go back to the wild.

Some simply die from the extent of their disease or their injury, others are euthanized to end the suffering for animals whose injuries simply cannot be healed.

Unfortunately, some of them have to remain in captivity or be euthanized simply because they've grown too tame and they would not function normally in their natural environment.

But one of the animals that do get released, what happens to them?

That's an important question.

(soft bright music) In the field of wildlife medicine and wildlife rehabilitation, we're very fortunate to have new technologies that give us the capability to treat animals successfully that a few years ago would have been euthanized and would have had no hope of going back to the wild.

But we really need to know more about what happens to our patients after they're released, and that's where post-release studies come in.

Now, we've been trying to gather information on free ranging wildlife for a long time, and there are many technologies out there that we use.

One of the original technologies used to gather information particularly about migratory birds is one of the most basic yet dependable forms of data collection, the bird band.

This tiny little aluminum bracelet goes over the leg of the bird and is fastened in place right above its foot.

And on each of these bands is an absolutely unique number that is recorded in the US Geological Survey's, Bird Banding Laboratory, and it identifies what the bird is that is wearing the band, where the band was applied, and then eventually, if it's recovered, where the bird was found.

Now that technology has been around a long time, it was used for the first time in 1890 by a biologist in Denmark.

Well, the bird band is still popular and we've improved on it somewhat over the years.

These are two little bands from a Peregrine Falcon, and as you can see, one is green and one is green and black, and the numbers on them are large enough, they can actually be seen from about 50 yards with a powerful spotting scope, but that's still very limiting and returns are only account for 1% to 2% of all the bands that are applied, but new technologies are available for post-release studies as well.

>>One method of gathering post-release information on rehabilitated animals is the process of bird banding, which is when an aluminum or a colored band is placed on a bird that is engraved with a serial number that then gives you any information on that bird.

So it's similar to a VIN number or a license plate that's put on a car.

The bird banding process can vary depending on the research being conducted.

The bands are federally regulated, but the information collected can vary depending on the goal of the study.

Bands are placed around the leg of a bird, or more specifically the tarsus, and it should be able to spin freely and not impede any movement of that animal.

The information gathered during this process can be things like the sex of the animal, the species, the age, and then any measurements that that scientists might need such as the weight or the wing measurements of the bird.

And then the type of band used on a bird can depend on the size of that animal, so a bald eagle, for instance, might need a stronger band than something like a red-tailed hawk.

The information gathered on each banded bird is entered into a program called Bandit, which is available only to permitted bird banders, and it's run by the USGS or a United States Geological Survey and maintained by the Bird Banding Laboratory.

If someone finds a banded bird, they can either call the USGS or go online to the Bird Banding Laboratory and enter that information found on the band online.

Then once they enter that information in, anything that is recorded for that bird specifically will be given to the finder, so the age, the sex of the bird, when it was banded and who banded that bird.

The process to becoming a bird bander is pretty involved and can take a number of years, studying under somebody who is master permitted in bird banding.

You have to be able to build a banding resume that involves qualifications and expertise in order to safely handle those animals, not only for your wellbeing, but for the wellbeing of the animals that you were handling.

The return rate on banded raptors is fairly low as they are not a species that's harvested like waterfowl and where we're located here at the Wildlife Center of Virginia, there are not many banding stations nearby that would tag those animals and record the information on those serial numbers on their bands.

We have in the past had some bands returned, one example that comes to mind is an eastern screech-owl that was admitted as a nestling and then raised all the way until it was an adult and then released.

Unfortunately, it was then found by a private citizen hit by a car, but a long time after we released it.

So while it's unfortunate that that owl ultimately did not survive, it is useful for us to know that it survived a long time in the wild after being raised from a baby to an adult.

(soft bright music) >>In the last few decades, there have been tremendous advances in the field of telemetry.

Now for awhile, radio collars that were used on animals like bear or big horn sheep or even elephants, allowed researchers to follow on foot as their research animals move through their habitat.

They had collars on that literally gave off a radio signal, but you had to be within radio range, walking through the bush with an antenna to zero in on that animal.

Today, the technology has advanced greatly, instead of radio signals, we're now using microwave signals or cell phone signals or satellite technology.

The devices are getting smaller, the signals are getting more powerful and the science behind it is reaping the rewards.

This is a microwave telemetry unit that we just took off of a golden eagle.

And with this little harness over the bird's head under its wings, it's fastened right between the bird shoulder blades, completely irrelevant to the bird's ability to move, and pretty soon he forgets it's even there.

It's got solar panels on it, so it recharges its own batteries.

And through the technology of this type of device, we are literally able to follow birds like Eagles and others as they go through their daily lives, recording data on longitude and latitude, their elevation, their speed, their temperature, the environment in which they're located.

For the Wildlife Center of Virginia, the results of telemetry studies have given us a wealth of information on our former patients.

We've attached similar devices to more than a dozen bald eagles, as an example.

And we know that today many of these birds are still out there doing normal eagle stuff, years after they were in the hospital and years after they were released, and let me tell you, it's an awfully good feeling to know that your efforts paid off.

>>Since 2011, the Wildlife Center has been able to put GPS transmitters on nearly two dozen bald eagles.

In most of those cases, the state eagle biologists came to fit the transmitters on the birds, and they all became a part of a larger research study that he has going on that looks at how bald eagles use airspace, particularly around airports and just tracking their seasonal movements in Virginia.

It's really interesting to look at the data that we get from the transmitters and just get a sense of what these eagles are doing.

We can look at the different types of habitats they're visiting, we can see how long they spend in flight, and we can note if they're making any seasonal movements throughout the course of the year.

In most of these cases, these birds have been returned to the area from which they were rescued, so it's setting them up to be in their home territory.

And in a lot of cases, we're seeing that the adult bald eagles wearing the transmitters, generally stay in that area, or at least move around and hit certain areas of Virginia and Maryland seasonally, and for the young birds, they really tend to move a lot more widely.

And that's really fitting with what we know about bald eagle natural history, the mature adults have their own established territories that they have set and need to defend, and the young birds don't really have that yet, so they're a little more nomadic and they wander a bit more because they don't hit full maturity until they're five years of age.

Two of my favorite tracking observations were on two young bald eagles that came to us in 2017.

They were both found separately in Virginia as very young fledglings, and they came into our facility and were raised together throughout the summer, and then were released together at Mason Neck State Park in August of 2017.

And they spent their first fall and winter just hanging around Northern Virginia, the Northern Neck, and sometimes they would cross the Potomac River into Maryland as well.

So everything was normal, they were doing their lives in the wild, and we were happy to check up on them.

The following summer, we got a bit of a surprise when both birds left Virginia within two weeks of each other and suddenly traveled North through Pennsylvania, through New York and into Canada, and they both ended up spending the summer in Quebec.

They were in different areas, but they both stayed up there all summer, and in October eventually came back to Virginia, again, within two weeks of each other.

The majority of the eagles we've been able to track have gone on to live successful lives in the wild.

In a couple of cases, eagles that we have released have passed away, but even in those situations we were able to get more information and learn more about the dangers that bald Eagles are facing in the wild.

By keeping track of the data that these Eagles give us post-release, we are very much reinforced in the idea that wildlife rehabilitation works, whether it's an adult eagle that has come in injured and gone through a hospitalization and recovery period, and we get that bird ready for release again, or if it's a young bird that's just growing up away from its parents and missing out on those natural opportunities that it would have in the wild, we can see in either of those situations, these birds can go out there and we can prepare them for life again in the wild.

(soft bright music) >>When we want to track mammals that we've released out of rehab and check how they're doing for post-release data, there are a few challenges, mainly the items that we use to track those animals.

So a lot of them would require collars or GPS tags or they make GPS backpacks, but a lot of the things that we release are babies, so they're gonna grow a lot by the time we get a sufficient amount of data.

So you kind of have to account for that, if they're gonna grow, will that item that you're using as the trucker pose any threat to them, will they outgrow it, will it fall off, will maybe the battery die before you get a sufficient amount of data?

Also, we release a variety of species, so there's not a one size fits all tracker, every species has a different body shape, uses their body in different ways to climb or dig, so all of that has to be taken into account.

So for the patients that we release, getting any post-release data is really important for various reasons.

So in rehab, we put a lot into our work, not just mentally and physically, but also in terms of money, resources and time.

So we're raising these babies for months, so in the case of our bear cubs for a year, and then releasing them into the wild.

And most of the time, we have no idea how they do once they're out.

We don't know if they're surviving, if they're struggling, if they know how to properly forage or find those denning places for the winter.

So having some sort of pre-release monitoring is essential to give us that information.

It also lets us know if they are doing what bear should be doing and acting like a bear, or if they're showing negative and undesirable behaviors, such as interacting with humans in a way that they shouldn't be, and that in turn can reflect back on us and let us know whether or not our protocols and our procedures and what we're doing in that year we have those bears is working, or if we need to make some changes.

There are a couple of methods that you can use to tag bears for post-release studies, this type that we use here at the Wildlife Center is called ear tagging.

So we are given these ear tags by the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries.

Each tag has a set of numbers that is unique to this tag, therefore, unique to the bear that we tag these with.

And so the ear tags, the benefit to those as well, once the bears are released, they're technically yearlings, so they'll grow and become even larger as they grow into their adult life.

So they will not outgrow these ear tags.

They can stay on them for the remainder of their lives, which is really great, it's a concern that we don't have to have once they're released.

Additionally, because they have unique numbers, if the bear is hit by car and parishes, or is harvested or becomes a nuisance bear and is spotted, whoever notices that can report these ear tags to the Game Department, who will then report it to us.

So it allows them to know kind of what's happening with the bears that they came from us, and then again, whether or not our methods of raising these bears are working.

The second type of post-release monitoring we can do is by using GPS collars.

So there are a couple challenges with GPS collars, but there's also great benefit with them.

The first challenge is the cost.

So financially one collar is about $1,500, and for last year here at The Center, we had 18 bears to release.

If we had collared every one of them, it would have cost us $27,000.

The second challenge with those collars is that it poses a risk of potentially constricting the bears neck as they grow into adults.

But there was a study recently released by Coy Blair out of the Appalachian Bear Rescue facility, and they collared all of their yearlings post-release and they actually program the collars to drop off after one year.

So that then eliminates the risk of the bears outgrowing that method.

And the benefit of these GPS collars is that you can actually map where the bears are throughout that entire year that they're wearing those collars, it also allows you to get a more accurate time and potentially cause of death for these bears if that should happen.

The Wildlife Center of Virginia has been rehabilitating bears for release for nine years, so since 2011, but it wasn't until 2014 that we started tagging them on release.

And since 2014, we have tagged 70 black bears on their way back into the wild.

We define bear cub rehabilitation as being successful if the bears we release after one year period, haven't had any sort of human-wildlife conflict, or in other words, become nuisance bears.

Also, if they have survived that one year and don't have a natural cause of death that we know of.

We have learned so much in our Bear Rehabilitation Program here.

In the beginning, rehabbing bears between 2011 and 2014, the amount of caretakers we had for cubs was unlimited, anyone on the rehabilitation staff could take care of them, including the students that would come throughout the year to learn about rehab.

So they had a high number of people that they were exposed to throughout their time with us.

Our previous rehabilitator, Brie Hashem, did a study for post-released information on our bears that we've released, and out of the 52 bears we released between 2011 and 2018, 15% of those bears were human conflict or nuisance bears, and most of those bears came from that timeframe where they had an unlimited amount of caretakers.

In 2014, we changed our procedures for our bear cub program, and we limited their number of caretakers to just four individuals.

And so throughout their entire year, they're exposed to just four faces with us, from when they're tiny bottle fed Cubs to when they're large yearlings about to be released.

After that point in time, the numbers significantly dropped for those human conflict bears that we were finding.

>>So DGIF has been radio collar and black bears in the state since 2016.

So starting in the summer of 2016, we began putting these big collars on black bears across the central Piedmont of Virginia.

In this older style, this is the battery pack down at the bottom, so these older ones were fairly heavy, had to be a bear that's at least a hundred pounds before they could wear it.

So thankfully now technology has changed and we have these nice newer ones, a little bit smaller.

So this collar functions much the same way as those old ones, the battery pack is here at the bottom, the GPS signal that hits the satellites is up at the top.

And so the bear wears this around their neck, just like a collar and every four hours, it takes a point.

So it works just like your cell phone or a handheld GPS, it is taking location information based off of the satellites.

Now the neat thing with technology is that every three days I get an email from this collar and it gives me all of that data, so we don't have to go back out and find the bear, get this collar back off of her, it sends me all of that right through the internet.

So I can change all of that, I can have it send me data quicker than three days, I can change the number of points it takes every day, just right off of the computer.

So it's pretty amazing, and so all of that information we use to track their movements, their habitat, basically where they're feeding and using throughout the year.

So our colored sows or female bears, provide us a lot of great information on their movements, especially in the Piedmont area of the State.

So that's an area where for the last 10 to 15 years the bear population has really been increasing, and we didn't have a lot of information on where those bears were using as den sites in the winter, what type of food resources they were using throughout the year, reproduction information, number of cubs, what time of year they were going into their dens or having cubs.

So these collars by taking that location information and synthesizing it back for every one of those bears, we get a really good picture of their home range, their status, where they're going, what time of year they enter a den, when they're emerging from their dens and then what food resources they really like.

So the collared females that the Game Department has had since 2016, has greatly helped us out with our orphan cubs that we ended up with in the spring.

So unfortunately, as our black bear population is increased and we have a high human population across the State of Virginia, conflict can happen.

And so every once in a while, a sow can get bumped off of a den and ended up having these orphan cubs that needed to be placed somewhere.

So the best thing for those cubs is to go back out with a wild female bear.

And with these sows wearing these radio collars, we know exactly where they are, when they enter the den, we can go check them, see the number of Cubs that they have, and then when suitable, place these foster cubs, these orphans, right back with them.

Thankfully black bears are very good surrogate moms, they don't count when they go into the den to see how many young they have, and they will easily and readily take these foster, these orphan cubs in with them.

And so we can place them with them, makes it very easy for us to find them since they're wearing these radio collars.

So in January and February, we start going out and checking these female bears to see if they have got cubs.

So thankfully the collar does a lot of the work for us by sending us information about when that bears movement slow down.

So if the bear is not active for at least 30 seconds continuous in an eight hour stretch, which is not a lot of movement, they give them a long time to lay around and be pretty lazy, it will send me an email saying, "This bears movements have really slowed down."

So if I start seeing that in mid-November, and then she doesn't get up again as we get into late November, December, and she's not back moving around, I'm not getting points and new locations, I can pretty well guess that, okay she's probably entered a den and is going to have cubs at that point.

So we'll watch those points and tell about early January at that time, then we'll go in, since we have this GPS information, we'll sneak in nice and quiet and get probably 30 to 50 yards away and just listen at the den location, where we think the den is.

We're listening for cub sounds, they'll cry and squall just like normal little babies or puppies do, you can usually hear nursing sounds.

And so we generally check them anywhere from mid-January through early February, 'cause that's the timeframe that they're most likely to have cubs.

And once we get there, we can assess, does she have cubs?

What's the condition of that female?

How easy will it be to get into this area and use it as a foster?

But a lot of it is just based on that GPS data and where those points of kind of stacked up and limited movement since back in November.

>>While the use of high-technology telemetry units like this may not have a lot of practical application for the average citizen, there are definitely things you can do to help with post-release studies and the collection of data on wildlife.

If you find a bird that has a band on its leg, living or dead, do what you can to record all of the information about that encounter.

If the bird is no longer alive, collect the band, take it home and find the data online, or by simply sending it in to the US Geological Survey.

You'll get a lovely certificate for returning a band, and the data may be critical for the study of that species.

Now, if you're out and you see a large mammal as an example, and this is especially true for hikers and hunters, if that bear perhaps or deer or other type of large mammal has ear tags, it's very important to document what kind of ear tags the bear has, what are the colors?

Are they green, yellow, red, what have you, and in which ear is which color facet, because that can be critical to enable scientists to identify the animal.

Call your state wildlife agency and report it, or the US Fish and Wildlife Service, if it's a migratory bird.

Little things like that might not sound like much, but they really do pay off.

And if you encounter an animal that's wearing a telemetry collar, one of the things that is very helpful to researchers is to document not only exactly where it was found, but what behavior was the animal exhibiting.

Because a lot of times those collars are fastened to animals that have had a history, shall we say, of nuisance behavior, coming too close to people, raiding trash cans, and that's especially true for bears.

So documenting it and turning it in can be really helpful for hard science.

Now, certainly that may be the limit of what a lot of folks can do for the actual hands-on collection of data, but there are ways you can enjoy reading about, studying about and witnessing the results of the data collection.

The Wildlife Center of Virginia's website and many others regularly post telemetry feedback from the animals we have released that are wearing telemetry units.

Some of our patients have been here perhaps for months, but after they're released, even though they're free and able to go where they want, you're able to enjoy the adventure with them and learn right along with the Wildlife Center.

Above all recognize that what we know depends on who's willing to share information.

Get involved, you'll enjoy it.

>>[Female Announcer] Funding for "Untamed" is brought to you by.

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