Inebriate of air – am I – 
And Debauchee of Dew – 
- Emily Dickinson

Birdman of the Great Swamp: Leonard J. Soucy Jr. D.Sc., Founder of the Raptor Trust. Excerpts from my interview of Len for the first issue of Heron Dance in 1995. 

Len and his wife Diane have devoted the last thirty years to the care of sick and injured birds, particularly birds of prey. They got into this without any special training in veterinary medicine or ornithology. By trade Len is a tool and die maker. For the first fifteen years, he and his wife funded the entire operation out of their own pockets--the purchase of the material for cages, medical supplies and food. In the early days they caught fish and collected dead frogs off the road in order to feed injured herons. That would no longer be possible. As he says, the amphibian populations are just not there. His organization, The Raptor Trust, now treats over three thousand birds a year and has an annual budget of $300,000 which is donated by four to five thousand individuals and foundations. Fifty thousand people a year now visit the aviary in what was originally his backyard. One spring day we sat back there and Len shared his story.

 When my wife and I were first married, thirty-nine years ago, we travelled a little bit. One of the places we had read about, I think in an old Audubon magazine, was a place in Pennsylvania called the Hawk Mountain Sanctuary, where in the fall, if the hawk gods were kind to you, you could see tens of thousands of predatory birds in migration.

 I had read about migration and birds and hawks and whatever, but it didn't really register until I visited Hawk Mountain.  We were going to stay a day but we were astounded by the spectacle. That first day, I think we saw twenty thousand hawks. It was in September and the broad wings were migrating. We also saw Sharp-shin Hawks and Cooper's Hawks and an eagle. It kind of fractured our minds. That single event changed our lives. It led us to get serious about raptors--watching them, banding and doing basic research. A short while later an injured Red-Tailed Hawk wound up on our doorstep. Someone in the neighborhood knew that we were bird people and without saying anything just left it for us. That's pretty much how we got started. We wanted to do what we could.

But early on we figured out that if we are going to have a real impact it wasn't going to be because I fixed five hundred Red-Tailed Hawks in my life, and put them back into the wild, which I have, and probably considerably more than that, come to think of it. The real answer is convincing people that what a hawk needs, we need. A good environment for a hawk is a good environment for your kid. Good clean air, good clean water.

 Telling people what to do, of course, doesn't work. Doing it by example doesn't work worth a damn either, but a little better. We've chosen the little bit that we are able to do. Maybe change a few opinions along the way. I think we have, quite honestly, showed through a humane example how important it is to care. That's important. Even if it weren't important, I would still do it, because I chose personally, and the people here chose to do it that way. I hope it does some good. I've been working at this for thirty years, and things just keep getting worse. A lot worse. But you can't let that stop you. Trying and falling on your ass is nothing to be ashamed of. You should be ashamed if you don't try. Things might be even worse if we, and others like us, weren't trying.

 So we have put a lot of effort in the last ten or fifteen years into education--when people's minds are malleable--when they're young. That's who we want to talk to. Now we now have two full-time teachers and a classroom to talk to the kids who come here to see the birds. Three educational programs today were given to literally hundreds of kids--in one day. And we've talked to millions of them. I have and we have collectively. About a world we know really well, that we are sympathetic to, and that other people--inner city kids and others--don't know at all.

 When I go to a third grade class and sit an owl on the table, I say, `Look at this magnificent thing. You don't have to be afraid of it. You don't have to be afraid of anything in this world, except your own kind, unfortunately. Life on this planet that we all co-inhabit, that sustains us, is stable because it is made up of many, many different plants and animals. They are all important to the stability of the whole. When one element disappears, we are all more vulnerable.

 `This world is truly intricate, truly marvelous. A really, really interesting, diverse, beautiful place to have visited for a short time. Some of us get more out of it than others. Some try to get to get more out of it than others....I think you should make a conscientious effort to try. To be nosy. To look and to marvel. And not only to look but to see. Not only listen but hear on all different levels. It is indeed a marvelous world. Part of what makes it marvelous is our own kind. Part of what makes it incredibly marvelous to me are other than our own kind. It is important biologically to have them, but it's also important for my quality of life. I would not want to live in a world that had only people in it. I need snakes and frogs and creepy, crawly things and marvelous birds that can fly two hundred miles an hours and free my spirit....”