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.

>>Funding for Untamed is brought to you by... (birds chirping) (upbeat music) >>I certainly consider myself lucky to be fortunate enough to live in the Appalachian Mountains.

And while I love living here year round, without a doubt, my favorite time of the year is the autumn.

When the trees explode with color, when there's a chill in the air and the skies are filled with migrating birds.

There's really something magical about what Aldo Leopold referred to as goose music, the haunting call of the long Vs of geese and swans and waterfowl heading south from their nesting territories in Canada all the way to the wintering grounds along the Chesapeake Bay or the tidal rivers of the Southeast United States.

It's just magic.

(upbeat music) In addition to migrating waterfowl, there are literally hundreds of species of birds and even bats that migrate from nesting areas to the wintering grounds.

And some of these migrations are longer and shorter than others.

But without a doubt, one of the most perilous parts of this trip is for the birds and bats that migrate at night under the cover of darkness, where they literally navigate by the stars.

Birds aren't the only creatures migrating at this time of the year.

Perhaps one of the most well-known migrants is the Monarch butterfly.

They will spend every winter in tiny patches of fur forest in Mexico.

Then they will migrate a loop of 3000 miles up across North America, coming back to the same trees from which they started.

It's a remarkable process.

And it's one that makes them very popular to see, but also very vulnerable to damage along the way.

There are actually many types of migration on the planet, probably the longest and most dramatic are the great whales.

They'd go from the Arctic ocean all the way to the Antarctic every year and then turn around and come back.

Whale-Watching got to be a very, very popular tourist activity.

But there are really two overland migrations that remain in tact.

The most famous of which is the Serengeti where hundreds of thousands of antelope, Wildebeest, zebras, and others make the long migration from the arid territories to the areas where they can find food and the rainy South.

Here in North America, we have one remaining great migration, and that is the migration of the caribou from their calving grounds and the Arctic circle, South to the wintering grounds in the Brooks range or the Northwest territories or along the Yukon River.

There are 750,000 caribou that make this trek every year.

Migration is generally motivated by seasonal changes in the weather.

As it gets colder, animals move to a warmer area.

As food supply is reduced in the fall and winter months, they moved to an area where food is more abundant.

But we're having an impact on that, and some of the great migrations are being lost.

But every year, millions of people travel around the world to see these migrating animals and Marvel at this wonder of nature.

For some of us though, we're lucky enough to live where we have a front row seat.

(upbeat music) >>I grew up in Pennsylvania and not too far from hawk Mountain in the eastern part of the state.

And that was big up there.

And it's the original hawk migration site or hawk watch site in the United States.

That was the founding hawk watch site.

And I used to go there every year.

I would arrange ahead of time and drive there and spend an entire day there.

And then when I moved down here, I kept driving up there until one day I heard about this little hawk watch site on Afton mountain.

And I thought I would go up and check it out.

And lo and behold, I found lots of raptors and it's not quite as high in elevation as Pennsylvania.

The birds are a little higher than normal, but they're there, they're there by the hundreds and thousands.

So that got, got me hooked to stay, to help and collect more data.

We're called Rockfish Gap hawk Watch because we are located here right next to Rockfish Valley to the east and Shenandoah Valley to the west.

And this is rockfish gap where highway 64 goes through the Blue Ridge Mountains.

This is part of the Appalachian Mountains and more specifically the Blue Ridge mountains.

And most of these hawks like to follow the Appalachian Mountains when they fly South.

And up North, the Appalachian Mountains are much wider but down here they narrow.

So that concentrates the hawks in this area, which is why we're a good location to view hawks.

And then it sort of widens a little bit as it goes down toward Roanoke in that area.

So we're fortunate that we have 100 degree view and we can see these hawks and hopefully we can count all of them.

The whole point of the hawk watch is multifold, but the primary goal is to take part in Citizen Science.

So we have volunteers that come here to help us find the raptors and count the raptors.

And we do this as part of a large network of other up to 200 other hawk watch sites in North America.

Some have a couple of hundred birds a year, some have a hundred thousand plus a year.

It depends on location.

But all of us from all these different hawk watch sites, the point is to monitor this population every year and year after year at the same time in the same methodology so that we can see changes in population.

And if we see changes in their population, that then that's an indicator of our environment because they're top of the food chain.

If they start getting low in population, then there's something wrong with what they eat, they can't find enough food.

And it's usually due to habitat loss.

Our main goal was to monitor the population to learn about their changes in population.

And you can't do that in the summer or spring, because when they go to their breeding grounds, they just disperse and their whole goal in the breeding area when they nest is to find places to hide and raise their young in safety so you can't count them or find them.

But once a year, they migrate South through these geographic areas in large concentrations.

That's where we can get a good consistent count of the population.

And part of our goal is to make people aware of what's happening over their eyes, over their homes, in the fall every day, all these people driving down here have no idea that there are 8,000 hawks just flew over their heads and where they're going no one can believe that they fly from the Arctic Circle down to Brazil every fall over the ocean.

So we welcome anyone to come up to a hawk watch site.

It's not just me and my other hawk Watchers that do this.

We welcome the public to come up.

They can help find the hawks, they can learn to count the hawks if they want, or they can just sit down and have a picnic and enjoy the day and just listen to what happens, and a lot of people would like to just bring their family up and wait for us to find the hawks, and then they can find them and watch them and enjoy them and appreciate them and hopefully go home and think about them more.

And maybe it would impact some of their decisions they make in the future.

What they decide to do.

We tell people we see up to 14 different species of hawks and falcons and eagles.

A couple of them are very rare, like the Swainson's hawk, which is a Western bird, we might see one every couple of years.

But our main birds are the red-tailed hawks and red-shouldered hawks and kestrels that were know as we were driving along the road.

And then the osprey and the bald eagles migrate through here and then a sharp shins and Cooper's hawks are some of the other common birds.

We kind of everything we see actually.

So we see a lot of waterfowl migrating as well, and loons will fly off and fly overhead on big groups from the great lakes toward the coast.

But there are other animals that migrate too like Monarch butterflies.

We all know they fly to their special place in the Southwest US or in Mexico for the winter.

And they fly through here on days in late September by the 100s and we'll count them, and we keep track of that every year.

And then dragon flies, some dragonflies migrate in large groups.

And if we can we'll count them, if they don't bother our raptor count.

Like this morning we had so many dragon flies that we couldn't even... we had a hard time even seeing the raptors 'cause the dragonflies filled the sky.

And there are places that can see those big groups of dragonflies on radar.

(upbeat music) >>Grayson came to the Wildlife Center of Virginia as a patient in 2011.

She was found at the bottom of a tree with a severe fracture to her right wing as well as some injuries to her propatagium.

The propatagium of course is the piece of skin that connects the wrist to the shoulder.

And it's very stretchy so that birds can expand and contract their wings to fly.

When Grayson came to the wildlife center of Virginia, her fracture was surgically repaired, but unfortunately the damages to her propatagium are pretty permanent.

So she's not able to expand and contract her right wing enough to be able to fly long distances.

broad-winged hawks are basically the poster children for migration.

Every fall they gathered together in the 1000s to migrate almost 3000 miles down to South America, which was a pretty incredible feat.

Now, when they're migrating, they're not migrating away from the cold weather, they're actually following their food source.

So in the winter time, a lot of reptiles as well as small mammals do a really good job of either hibernating or hiding.

And so broad-winged hawks migrate so that they have a more plentiful food source.

Grayson is a very important species here at the Wildlife Center of Virginia for education purposes.

She teaches about habitat loss as well as habitat fragmentation, which is something that inhibits the easibility of migration for a lot of species.

So when you break up or delete a habitat on their migratory path, it's very hard for them to find places to stop over to feed and to rest.

Sort of like how it would be difficult for you to take a road trip across the country and there were no gas stations or restaurants along the way.

Hock watch is a really interesting event that happens every year during the fall at Afton Mountain.

It's a very interesting time of year during the migratory process.

A lot of birders actually volunteer their time to count the birds that fly overhead.

Sometimes there are 200 birds and sometimes there are over 11,000 birds flying overhead.

Grayson shows up to be the star of the show because a lot of these birders don't see these birds up close.

So Grayson is there to be able to show off her amazing feathers and just be there so that people can see her closer than a mile up in the sky when they're flying overhead >>Migration is a very risky, perilous, hazardous thing to do.

So why would an animal migrate?

They're migrating away from what they don't have to what they do have, greater food supplies, safety, security, warmer weather.

75% of North American birds will migrate every season.

The percentage of birds that don't migrate are small.

Those birds are called either resident or non migratory birds.

There are certain birds who have their own food, their own shelter in the place where they reside in.

In some cases, humans have affected that and we've created these wonderful ponds that are open all year around, lush grassy areas for example, Canada geese, who we now see all year round, but most birds do undertake the perilous journey to migrate.

As they're preparing to migrate, there are certain physiological changes that happen in birds.

One is molting, and I think we all might've seen molting birds in our own backyard or seen piles of feathers.

They do that to prepare to get new feathers that are more aerodynamic for their long journey.

And it's also done for the dimorphic birds that you see the beautiful colors during the breeding season in the summer, they molt into drabber colors into the fall so that they will be less risk for predation, and there'll be more camouflage in the areas that they are migrating to.

Birds gain a lot of weight, particularly in the fall but also for spring migrations.

They eat a lot more, their gonads will shrink if they're migrating in the fall, because there's no reason to use them since you're not going to breed.

They also will go through a hemoglobin increase.

And what the hemoglobin will do is it allows more oxygen to go to their muscles.

So that will help them in these long flights that they begin to take.

They will also start flocking together.

You'll see in the fall particularly birds gathering together.

And then some of them will take short flights away from the flock to kind of stretch their muscles and get their muscles ready for these long flights that they're going to take.

So migration is risky, risky business for these birds.

There are numerous threats that they will face along their migration.

Some birds may only migrate hundreds of miles.

Some will migrate thousands of miles.

The principle threat to these migratory birds is loss of habitat.

And that loss of habitat can be due to pollution, can due to agriculture, can be due to deforestation, can be due to mining, can be due to encroachments of suburbs and urbanization.

And that is singularly the biggest threat.

And collisions are another huge threat to migratory birds, particularly in the Western Hemisphere.

Collisions with buildings, particularly glass buildings, collisions with wind turbines, collisions with power lines, with communication towers.

All of those are enormously hazardous to birds.

Predators are another enormous threat to migratory birds along their paths.

Migratory birds, as they migrate, they may not know about the predator threats that are in their stop oversights or into their wintering grounds.

Principally, cats, both domestic and feral cats kill billions of birds every year.

They're also birds taken by the natural wild predators, which may be hawks and other mammal species.

So hunting takes place along the migratory routes, not just in our country, but in other countries.

And that's obviously done very purposefully because the birds are coming through there and so that's the optimal time for the hunters to take them, but there's also a lot of illegal hunting and a lot of poaching that takes place during that time as well.

It is an arduous dirt journey for a bird to fly hundreds to thousands of miles in a short period of time.

they do get exhausted, they do have to stop, and if there's not food or not shelter for them, they continue to fly on often to the point of exhaustion and dying.

So disease can be a very hazardous thing for migratory birds.

If a disease outbreaks takes place, it's taking place in these large flocks that are migrating.

So it can pass very quickly and kill large amounts of birds.

So many juvenile birds fly on migration on their own.

They've never done it before.

There's something instinctual in them that guides them.

But this inexperience can cause them to fly off their migratory route.

And even a day or two detour can mean the matter of life and death for this bird.

So inexperience does take a lot of birds and natural disasters.

They do happen, hurricanes, floods, fires.

And if they happen just at the right time when birds are migrating, it can have very serious effects.

(upbeat music) >>In a purely natural world, migration is always going to be a very difficult undertaking for the wildlife that travel these thousands of miles, physically demanding.

Many perils along the way in that natural world, including predators and the vagaries of the weather.

But speaking of the weather, humans are having a huge impact on that, and that's having a huge impact on migration.

As we are affecting temperature cycles, we are also affecting the distribution of plants and animals on the planet, and we are already affecting migration schedules.

We need to be mindful that what we do to one part of this planet affects all living things.

Do you ever looked at the map of the United States.

You'd recognize that most of our major cities are located along rivers.

Rivers were very important for human transportation and movement of goods and services.

Well, those same rivers are absolutely critical migration routes for migratory wildlife.

Whether it's birds or other types of animals that use the waterway as their pathway.

That's also where we find urban centers with skyscrapers covered in glass or reflective surfaces.

Those reflective surfaces attract migratory birds and cause collision injuries that kill millions of these birds every year.

There are campaigns going on in North America to simply get commercial structures to turn off the lights, and yet it's an uphill battle.

These urban centers and the change in wildlife habitat create hazards for migratory birds that many simply don't survive.

Human activity in general has fundamentally altered, great deal of wildlife habitat we once have.

And that's especially true for migratory corridors.

Deforestation, agriculture, residential, commercial activities, all destroy land that is important for wildlife.

As a result, the corridors that are left need to be protected.

Corridors that are lost need to be destroyed.

Every single migratory species depends on the opportunity to find a safe pathway whether is food cover and the opportunity to rest if their migration is to succeed.

As a nation, we all want an energy supply that is relatively inexpensive and sustainable, but we need to recognize that energy development is having a major impact on wildlife.

Even in the remote areas like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Now that it's open for oil and gas exploration and mineral development, those great caribou herds have to go around human development or simply get stopped if they encounter a pipeline.

Throughout the rest of the country, power lines, antennas, wind turbines, generation facilities all take a toll.

It's especially true for wind turbines.

While on the first blush, it's a sustainable and a green source of energy, but the placement of those turbines is absolutely critical to the ultimate impact it will have on the environment.

Many times turbines are placed on ridge lines where they turn 24 hours a day.

And in a strong wind, the tip of that turbine can travel at 180 miles an hour.

Well, that ridge line is also where migratory birds and bats pass often under the cover of darkness to devastating effect.

For human activity on the landscape, migratory corridors are increasingly in danger.

There are more physical barriers now confronting migratory species of wildlife than ever before.

We need to protect the corridors that are left.

We need to restore the corridors that have been compromised.

And we need to remember that it's up to us what the future holds >>During migration season, we see a higher variety of species here at the Wildlife Center.

So we see a lot of broad-winged hawks as well as nighthawks, which are part of the nature family, ruby-throated hummingbirds, and a lot of species of warblers.

These guys are coming in for different reasons, such as being hit by cars, flying into buildings or windows, or being what we call a failure to thrive.

So failure to thrive is usually a juvenile or young adult of a species who isn't successful in their first year of independence.

And so they're generally a little bit more thin than other species and kind of dehydrated and just overall weak.

Because these patients are coming in from flying into windows or being hit by cars or being that failure to thrive.

We see a lot of different injuries, such as broken bones, head trauma, internal trauma, or just overall generalized weakness.

When we have migratory species in rehab, we have to keep their timeline of the rehabilitation plan first and foremost, in our brains, it's the most crucial part.

So they're here coming through either heading South or heading North on their migration routes depending on what time of the year it is.

And especially that fall migration, the migration rate that's headed South, it's really important that we release them on time.

There's a definitive window of time where they have to catch that flyway down South and be able to go from a place that is lacking resources to a place that is plentiful and resources for them to thrive.

So we have to make sure that they are released in time to be able to catch that group headed south.

>>Migratory wildlife can use all the help they can get.

And there are actually things that you can do.

For an example, if you enjoy feeding the birds, especially during migratory seasons in the spring and in the fall, it's very important that you put a high quality bird food in your feeder so that the animals can get the energy they need as they visit your wait station.

It's also critically important that you keep those feeders clean because as birds congregate at a feeding station, if one happens to be sick, the chance of contagion is dramatically increased.

Simply by cleaning and disinfecting your feeders on a regular basis, you dramatically reduce that risk.

If you happen to live in an area where there is a public park or maybe duck pond, you really should avoid feeding waterfowl in those areas.

It causes an artificial concentration of animals that become habituated in time, but it also creates an opportunity for wild water fowl, geese ducks, swans, to interact with essentially para domesticated waterfowl.

Those that don't migrate.

Those that don't migrate are far more likely to carry diseases or pathogens that could be spread to wild populations.

And you just don't wanna be a part of that.

Now, something we touch on frequently is the need for pet owners to be responsible with their pets.

And that's especially true for cats.

Migratory birds moving into an area are often physically stressed and they're out of their home territory.

So they may not be as able to escape predation as indigenous populations would be.

Keep your cat in the house.

It's better for the cat, and it's certainly better for migratory birds.

If you happen to live in an area where there is a hawk migration or some other type of migratory bird count, I encourage you to participate, get involved because not only is it a wonderful activity, you meet some great folks and spend some great time outdoors.

The data collected through Citizen Science helps those of us in the professional world do what needs to be done to conserve all wildlife and give a helping hand to migratory species >>Funding is brought to you by... (birds chirping) (upbeat music)