Against all odds, these birds of prey are returning to the wild

Enoch Wildlife Rescue received a phone call from a person at Dixie Power in late June that went something like this:

“Mr. Tyner, we’re dealing with an issue. There is a hawk nest on a power pole transformer that could possibly start a wildfire. We must remove the nest. There are two eggs in the nest; the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources asked us to contact you because you are the federally licensed wildlife rehabilitator in southern Utah.”

Martin Tyner and his wife, Susan, are the cofounders of the nonprofit wildlife rescue and rehabilitation organization based in the tiny town of Enoch, about seven miles northeast of Cedar City.

“Why the birds didn’t get electrocuted, I have no idea. But it was a bad place. One spark and the nest would explode and (start) a wildfire,” he said.

Tyner told Dixie Power to pull the eggs and get them to him as fast as possible because if they cool off they won’t hatch. Workers showed up within the hour. “The Dixie Power guys went way out of their way to bring these eggs in,” he said.

He called it a unique situation and said it’s rare for bird eggs to be brought into the facility.

Tyner quickly placed the eggs into an incubator, though he saw it as a “really slim chance” the birds would make it. Within two days the first egg started to hatch. The second followed two days later. From that point, rescue workers fed the Swainson’s hawk chicks every two hours. The species is named after British naturalist William Swainson, who first illustrated the hawk in Canada in 1827.

Their diet consisted of what they would naturally eat in the wild: rodents. Workers chopped up mice into small portions and fed them just like their avian parents would.

Time for them to fly

“We got the little guys raised up,” Tyner said, adding the young hawks are now full grown, flying well and feeding themselves. “They’re ready to go back to the wild.”

Next Monday at 6 p.m., Enoch Wildlife Rescue intends to release the birds at the C overlook above Cedar City, with Dixie Power representatives on hand.

A mostly western bird, Swainson’s hawks commonly nest in southern Utah and in mid-September they start their migration south, traveling as far as Argentina. The rescued hawks need a couple of weeks to take care of themselves in the wild before the urge sets in to fly south.

“I don’t pretend that these guys are going to be successful because 80% of all birds of prey don’t survive the first year. These have every bit as good a chance as any wild one does,” he said. “It’s tough out there. Only the very, very fittest survive.”

The center also has two other Swainson’s hawks ready to release that came in as chicks.

Caring for critters

Tyner said he’s often asked why he rescues animals when the odds of their survival are so low. About 70% to 80% of the injuries to birds brought to the center, he said, were human caused — cars, windows, fences, poison and other disturbances.

“I was always raised when I was a child that if you break something, you have a moral and ethical responsibility to fix what you’ve broken,” he said. “Since so many of these have been broken by human contact, it’s only the right thing to do to at least attempt to rescue and rehabilitate and release as many back to the wild as you can.”

Established in 1997, Enoch Wildlife Rescue has rescued everything from scorpions and tarantulas to hummingbirds and eagles as well as foxes and coyotes. In 2024, it built an $800,000 rescue center. It recently released a great horned owl, a golden eagle and some Cooper’s hawks.

“We do a lot of wildlife rescue down here,” Tyner said, adding it’s one of the last remaining rescue facilities between Salt Lake City and Los Angeles. “If it’s native to Utah, our organization does everything we can to try to get them healthy and returned to the wild. Somebody’s gotta take care of these critters.”