We believe the eagle is the only one that has seen the face of the creator.
It is important for us to take in an injured bird, to get him well and release him back to the wild.
Hopefully he’ll carry that message back to the creator and he’s going to bless our people.
Hi my name is Victor Roubidoux, I’m the caretaker out here, for the eagles.
The Bah Kho-Je Xla Chi facility, and I was very honored when the tribe asked me to do this.
To be able to come out here every day to take care of these eagles is and honor for me.
It’s a sacred place for us here, to be able to be in this facility to be able to take care of these birds,
because when we use their feathers, and the bone whistles from their left wing,
we use that in our religious ceremonies, and the right wing bone we use in our dances.
So it’s an honor to be out here to be able to take care of them, and to see them every day.
And each one of them has their own personality, the way they do things.
A lot of folks don’t think animals have personalities, but I guarantee you, these birds have personalities.
And the way they conduct themselves everyday it’s a joy for us to seen them,
and to watch them-how they do, and how they exist here amongst each other.
When we first built this facility, we had the flight cage and this side mews here, and our capacity was 4 non-releasables
and we could keep our flight cage open for 11 rehab birds.
Soon as we got our capacity filled with our 4 non-releasable birds, then the calls starting coming in from all over the country.
They came in from Wyoming, Maine, Florida, Nebraska, Iowa,
and we ended up turning down 37 eagles, cause we didn’t have the room.
And once I told our tribe about that, we were able to grant me enough money to add on to our currently facility,
and we’re able to now to hold 15 non-releasables.
But, right now we have, as of today, we have 8 eagles.
We have 4 more coming. We’re going be out of room before too long,
so our plans are to build an additional side mews on our east side, and then an ICU room,
because we don’t have one now and we’re having to use our storage facility to treat an injured bird.
And then also, we want to build a separate flight cage to house or rehab birds in,
so we can keep them segregated from the public, as they go through the rehab process.
And that’s what we hope to do, and we’re appealing to folks for donations.
The eagle not only means a lot to the native culture, but to the general public at large,
and so we’re appealing to folks that any donations, large or small, are greatly appreciated, so we can take in more eagles.
We know we can’t save all the eagles, but there’s a lot out there we can take care of,
and also, we’re appealing to other tribes out there, maybe they can do the same thing that we’re doing, there’s a need for more facilities.
We’d be willing to share our knowledge, the training, plans, how to build one, and all this.
We’d like to work with other tribes to see more facilities like this appear across the country,
because now that they’ve taken them off the endangered list, they’re threatened.
Unfortunately, that means to me, that they’re going to be moving in to pristine areas,
there’s going to be more injures to eagles as they move out of their natural habitat and move into other habitat.
There’s going to be more injures, so there’s going to be more need for these facilities,
and we’d like to see more of these happening and we’d be willing to share our knowledge with other tribes to do that.
I expect by this time next year, we’re going to be looking at, unfortunately, having to turn down birds.
And what that means, is probably 90% of the time, those birds are going to be euthanized, and there’s no need for that.
Those birds can still live out their lives, and that’s what we want to do,
is be able to let them continue their lifespan, and we’ll take care of them as their feathers drop we’ll pass them out to our tribal members,
and hopefully, I talk to our tribe, but once we satisfy that need, then we’re going to be able to pass those feathers out to other tribes,
and that’s our goal, is to be able to do that -- save eagles and get feathers out to other tribes that need them.
I love that about our education program, we didn’t realize at the time how it was going to expand upon us,
we had put in just three viewing windows, we had thought we were just going to be educating our tribal members about this,
about the eagles and letting them come to see.
It actually took off and just mushroomed since we did that.
We’ve had, as of today, we've 945 people come through our facility.
We’ve had people from, let’s see, Nicaragua, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, England, Russia,
we had a Buddhist monk come by, we’ve had numerous elders from different tribes come.
We’ve had Boy Scout troops, Girl Scout troops, veterans groups.
I don’t know how many veterinarians we’ve had come through;
Dr. Erica Miller (CHECK) has been here, Dr. Martha Larry, Dr. John Hoover from OSU, Dr. Paul Welch, of course.
I’ve been working with the Iowa Tribe, with the Eagle Sanctuary here for about two years, since it first began.
And then also, they’ve had real good veterinarian support from the OSU College of Veterinarian Medicine, which is nearby.
And then also from other veterinarians in the Tulsa area,
And the nice thing is that they’ve been well trained by others, so they can handle small issues that arise,
and if there is something more complicated, then the veterinarians get involved, as it should be.
One of the nice things about this sanctuary, is we’ve been doing rehabilitation,
the biggest problem is there‘s certain situations when they’re not releasable.
We’ve got birds in the sanctuary that we wish were not in the sanctuary,
we wish were out having babies and flying free and fishing in the rivers and everything like this,
but the only alternative for these eagles is euthanasia.
And because of that, we now have kind of a halfway house, where we can care for the eagles,
and in return, they give us education, their help for teaching the kids.
The injuries that we see a lot here, unfortunately in Oklahoma, gunshot eagles.
We’ve had two of our birds come through here that have been gun shot.
The others are probably from when the water freezes over, and the birds are going after road kill,
because they’re opportunists, and they get injured by cars or trucks that hit them, is another injury.
And birds that have injured wings, broken wings, eyesight --
we have one bird here that is blind in his right eye, other than that he can fly real well.
We also have another bird that has an injured wrist that had been shattered,
and she’s here, she’s a non-releasable.
And right now our capacity is, like I said, we have 8 birds today, and we have two Golden Eagles, and six Bald Eagles that have been injured.
What we’re doing here today is appealing to the public at large, to help us out.
We really need some help here.
Like I said earlier in our interview, that the tribe has been kind enough to donate $100,000 towards this facility,
and we had to turn down a lot of eagles, once we were at our capacity at the time.
And right now, there is a great need for this, for more funding to come in.
We can’t save all the birds, but like I said, we can save quite a few of them.
And with the 37 we turned down, unfortunately, probably 10%, or maybe less of those birds, were placed in an education program,
and the rest were euthanized. And that was really hard for us to understand, that these birds mean so much to us as a culture,
that it really breaks our heart when we find out that we have to turn down birds, and then those birds are going to be euthanized.
And so that’s why we are appealing to everyone, to help us out, to save more birds.
Donations, large or small, are greatly appreciated.
And hopefully, that with donations coming in, that we can expand our facility, and we can make it even larger and we can save more birds.
Any tribe that would be willing to look at building a facility like this, we would help out in any kind of way;
plans, knowledge, training, and whatever we could do to help them be successful at doing what we are doing.