Tutor Dr. Tom Kaiser Rehabilitates, Releases Peregrine Falcon

When he was 13 years old in Bakersfield, California, Thomas Aquinas College tutor Dr. Thomas J. Kaiser once found an injured red-tailed hawk. After bringing the bird home, he went to the library and read every book he could find about falconry.

Although this, his first rehabilitation effort, failed (“I didn’t know what I was doing,” he admits), the experience sparked a lifelong love of falconry and birds of prey. After graduating from Thomas Aquinas College in 1975, he earned a doctorate in biology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and chose falcons for his dissertation, “The Behavior and Energetics of Prairie Falcons Breeding in the Western Mojave Desert.” An ornithologist and licensed falconer, he now regularly lends his expertise to the Ojai Raptor Center for various wildlife-rehabilitation efforts.

Last week, Dr. Kaiser had the joy of releasing a year-old,  male peregrine falcon back into the wild after it had recovered from an injury to its wing. “They wanted to make sure it could fly well enough to hunt and thrive before letting it go,” Dr. Kaiser explains. So his first duty was to train the bird to stay near.

“It’s a friendship of utility,” Dr. Kaiser jokes. “I feed the birds off of my glove, so they see me as a source of food.” When he was confident that the falcon would come back, he allowed it to take test flights, so as to monitor its progress. Upon determining that it could function on its own, he gave the falcon one last meal, and then set it loose.

“They integrate into the wild quite naturally,” Dr. Kaiser says. “If they are not hungry, and looking to me as their source of food, they will simply fly off and never return” — as did this young peregrine, who eagerly soared into the sky, free from the jesses that had once bound him to Dr. Kaiser’s glove.

“I went back to the same site twice the next day,” Dr. Kaiser adds, “and the falcon was gone.” Mission accomplished.