Rocky Mountain Raptor Program-RMRP

Did you know that August is Make-A-Will month? 📝

Whether you have a will already or haven't given any thought to it, creating a will is one of the most impactful steps you can take to protect the people and causes you love. Now is the perfect time to think about creating a meaningful legacy for generations to come.

Want to learn about legacy giving? RMRP works closely with Estate Attorney Jim Parke to answer your estate planning questions. Email [email protected] or visit rmrp.org/Legacy to learn more.

Happy Colorado Day! ❤️💛💙

We hope you're able to take some time to enjoy the beautiful Colorado outdoors today. Whether its a few minutes or a full hike, we love sharing our state with all our neighbors - human and raptor.


📸: Osprey by Deana Mueller.

Happy ! 🤓

Today, we want to highlight some of this year's awesome interns. Every summer, we welcome interns in our Education and Rehabilitation teams as part of our mission to further the future of wildlife conservation through the next generation of rehabbers and educators. Our interns learn to care for our patients, explore ways to enrich our Ambassadors, learn public speaking and educating skills, and get hands-on experience in wildlife rehabilitation. And we get a great opportunity to welcome new faces and have hardworking people to help during our busy season.

Many of our staff and long-term volunteers first joined RMRP as interns, making the internship program an important pathway for developing the next generation of wildlife rehabilitators and professionals. While our patients often receive the spotlight, our interns are the dedicated people working behind the scenes to make those success stories possible. Thank you to all of this year's interns for your hard work so far this summer - and to all our past interns who have stayed part of the RMRP family. 💜


📸: Some of this year's interns. All interns are trained by experienced volunteers and licensed wildlife rehabilitators to handle patients and Ambassadors.

Happy ! This week, we're in desperate need of cleaning supplies 🛁

As the summer gets busier and busier, we are in need of supplies to help keep our patients and enclosures clean. Our biggest needs are:
🧤 Medium Nitrile gloves
🫧 Hand soap refills
🧴 Unscented bleach & Liquid laundry detergent
🧻 Toilet paper and paper towels
🧼 Disinfecting wipes

Items from Watson's Wish List directly support the rehabilitation, rescue, and care of raptors in northern Colorado and southern Wyoming. Items can be shipped directly to us at rmrp.org/Watsons-Wish-List or dropped off at our facility M-F, 9-4.
720B E Vine Dr., Fort Collins, CO 80524

One Tough Hawk 🪶

Our rehabilitation team often jokes that Swainson's Hawks don't find their brains until after their first migration to Argentina and back. Young hawks can be clueless and, dare we say it, a little derpy. Adults, however, are cut from an entirely different cloth. They're notoriously fearless and not afraid to enforce their personal boundaries with wing slaps, foot strikes, and even the occasional charge at caretakers who venture a little too close.

Enter this adult Swainson's Hawk, who was found limping along a busy roadway. While she isn't sharing the details of how she was injured, our team suspects she may have been in an altercation with another hawk, struck by a vehicle, or possibly both. She arrived with extensive soft tissue trauma, including head wounds that exposed portions of her skull, deep lacerations to her legs, a large keel wound that required sutures, and body-wide soft tissue trauma and bruising.

Despite the severity of her injuries, she wasted no time reminding us that she is, indeed, an adult Swainson's Hawk. Warning signs now hang outside her critical care enclosure to help keep her human caretakers safe, and only our most experienced volunteers are assigned to her care when she needs to be caught for medications and wound treatments.

Over the past month, she's received intensive daily wound care, antibiotics, pain medication, supportive care, and, of course, plenty of nutritious meals. Thanks to that dedicated care - and her own remarkable fighting spirit - she has made an incredible recovery. She's now healthy enough to graduate to an outdoor enclosure, where she can continue healing with more hands-off care.

Her journey isn't over just yet. She still has flight conditioning and several evaluations ahead before she's ready to return to the wild.

If you'd like to support her continued recovery, please consider making a donation to help cover the cost of her mice, medications, and ongoing care at rmrp.org/donate.


📸: The adult Swainson's Hawk in one of our Critical Care Unit enclosures, with a warning sign to keep our volunteers and staff safe.

June's Volunteer of the Month is Alice! 🎉

Alice joined RMRP just over a year ago and has been and amazing part of our Education team. We are so grateful for her dedication to our work during her breaks as a teacher.

"Volunteering for RMRP is important to me because it gives me another avenue to learn and educate myself and others on the beautiful birds we share our spaces with," she said. "Of course working with the ambassadors is an incredible experience. What I didn’t expect was to find such an amazing community of humans as well! Staff and volunteers are so generous with their knowledge, their time, and their support and I am very privileged to get to be part of it."

Alice has loved being able to introduce the ambassadors to the fifth and first graders at her school.

Thank you for your hard work, Alice! 💜


📸: Alice with Educational Ambassador Eowyn (Swainson's Hawk) at the RMRP facility and Barley (Swainson's Hawk) at a winter educational presentation.

Whooo can spot the Barn Owls? 🦉

Sometimes our daily bird checks come with a side of searching as our patients naturally tuck themselves into nooks and crannies in their enclosures.

Can you spot all of the Barn Owls in this photo? Bonus points if you can you tell which Barn Owl is a foster parent! Let us know below 👇

*Foster parent raptors in our care are permanently disabled and were deemed non-releasable. The US Fish and Wildlife Service allows the RMRP latitude on our permits to keep certain individual raptors of the species we most commonly see during nesting season.

Want to know where we'll be next? Want to hear what's going on behind-the-scenes? Sign up for our newsletter! 📨

From patient insights to more about our research, information about our upcoming appearances and the successes your support makes possible, our newsletter is a great way to stay informed about all things RMRP.

Sign up today for our print and digital newsletter at rmrp.org/newsletter

Enjoy the fresh air this weekend with another Raptors and Nature! ⛰️🦅

Join City of Fort Collins Natural Areas and RMRP this Saturday, July 25 for a morning hike at Reservoir Ridge Natural Area followed by a raptor talk featuring live Educational Ambassadors at Primrose Studios. Learn more about the ecosystem from a naturalist, then learn about the raptors that call NoCo home.

The event is free, but registration is required. Sign up by selecting Raptors and Nature from the calendar at https://engage.fcgov.com/Calendar