Ottawa Valley Wild Bird Care Centre breaks ground on new $4M bird hospital

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Ottawa’s newest hospital will boast a radiology suite, an intensive care unit, two isolation rooms, ultraviolet sterilization methods and more wings than any other hospital in the city.

The Ottawa Valley Wild Bird Care Centre broke ground on its new building last week, a $4-million structure on 13 acres of land on McArton Road, off Dwyer Hill Road near Highway 7. After three years of delay, primarily due to the COVID-19 pandemic, construction is expected to begin later this month or in early July.

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“This is going to be an amazing building. It has all the features you could ask for,” said Juliette Marczuk, chair of the centre’s board of directors.

Established in 1981, the bird care centre outgrew its original home and has been operating out of a cramped temporary facility on Cedarview Road since 2021.

The new building will have larger enclosures, both inside and outside, that will give birds the space they need to fly and exercise injured wings. It will have a small visitors’ centre with an interactive display on environmental stewardship, something that couldn’t be accommodated in the temporary space.

“We get asked, ‘Why in the world do you need such a large building?’ ” Marczuk said. “Each bird needs a certain-sized enclosure in order to get the exercise they need before release. They’ll have a habitat that makes them feel at home. Eventually, they’ll get moved to an outdoor aviary where they can get acclimatized to the temperature, maybe even get a little bit of rain. That’s a very important part of the recovery process.”

Dr. Robin Roscoe, the centre’s veterinarian, says having proper veterinary facilities in the new building will be a game-changer. As it is, if a bird needs X-rays or blood work done, it must be transported to an animal hospital for the tests, which is costly, time-consuming and can traumatize the birds even more.

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“They’re already stressed. They’ve come from the wild. Having a lab and X-rays on site will be great,” Roscoe said. “The ability to assess them and triage them on site will be a huge benefit for the birds.”

The Ottawa Valley Wild Bird Care Centre is one of the few rehab centres in Ontario dedicated exclusively to birds. It operates under licences from both the federal and provincial governments, caring for thousands of sick or injured birds from across Eastern Ontario.

While window strikes — like that one that killed Sunny, the rare western tanager that was Ottawa birders’ winter celebrity — are among the most common injuries to the birds the centre receives, the greatest threat to wild birds comes from cats, Marczuk said. Biologists estimate cats kill 2.6 billion birds per year in North America compared to an estimated 624 million deaths from window strikes.

The wild bird care centre is now approaching “peak baby bird season,” when people bring orphaned fledglings in for care. The voracious babies, some still blind and featherless, must be fed every 20 minutes.

The centre has 14 full-time staff and about 50 volunteers to keep up with demand. Volunteers carry timers with them to remind them of the continual need for meals.

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“We’re not nearly as good providers as the real parents,” Marczuk conceded.

Current patients at the Cedarview location include clamoring baby robins and starlings, a tiny saw-whet owl and a show-stopping indigo bunting. The average length of stay can vary, with birds injured in the fall migration often staying over for the winter until they can be safely released. Some birds that are too badly injured to be released remain as permanent residents.

The centre takes care with its records so that someone who delivers an injured bird can track its progress and, hopefully, its eventual release.

When first proposed, the new McArton Road building was expected to cost $1.7 million, money the centre had already raised from donations. Construction delays and soaring costs have pushed the price tag to more than $4 million, Marczuk said, about half of which has been raised.

“The sad part is that there are fewer and fewer rehab facilities that have been able to stay open,” Marczuk said. “We have to follow very strict guidelines and rules and regulations from government. That makes it very difficult.

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“There just doesn’t seem to be any funding for the type of work we do.”

Why birds? How can millions spent on a bird hospital be justified?

“If I was any more of a bird lover, I’d be covered in feathers,” said Marczuk, who got involved with the centre after she brought an injured bird she’d found to be cared for by centre founder Kathy Nihei.

“We’re more tied to birds and the environment than we realize,” she said. “Birds are found everywhere on the planet and they play a very important role for the balance of ecological systems — marshlands, wetlands, grasslands … We, as humans, also depend on those ecosystems for our own existence and those are ecosystems that birds help keep healthy.”

Studies have shown being around birds is good for people’s mental health and has a positive effect on people with depression, she said. In its more than 40-year history, the centre has treated approximately 85,000 birds. Survivors go on to produce young of their own, she said.

“Multiply it over a few generations and you’ve not just saved one bird, you’ve saved hundreds.”

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