Our Profile

Established in 1990, the Medina Raptor Center is now one of Ohio's leading raptor rehabilitation facilities. We treat 200-300 birds each year. Most come to us with human-related injuries, such as motor vehicle collisions, poisoning (often by pesticides), gunshot wounds, and cat attacks. All receive individual attention, appropriate veterinary care, physical therapy, training and conditioning before return to the wild.

MRC is a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization with all the required state and federal licenses. It depends solely on the generosity of our contributors, the donations of services by skilled veterinarians and countless hours provided by our volunteers.

Our purpose is to rescue, rehabilitate and release injured or orphaned birds.  We work with songbirds, waterfowl, and specialize in birds of prey.  Professional medical treatment is donated by a number of local veterinarians.  Our job is to provide the birds with post-treatment care (such as wound management, medications and physical therapy) in order to return them to the wild.  This treatment is provided at our small medical facility and through the use of more than 40 cages of various sizes for therapy and flight work.  We also utilize falconry equipment and techniques to provide physical conditioning and flight practice for the birds.

Our Volunteers

Depending on the volunteer’s level of experience, duties could include assisting with medical treatments, cleaning bird pens, food preparation, directly feeding birds of prey, cleaning and feeding rodents, training and exercising our educational birds, flight training birds of prey, assisting in educational presentations and record keeping.  Other duties could include transportation of birds to the veterinarian, rescue of injured birds, writing articles for our newsletters, mailing newsletters, web site maintenance, or development of software tools to make our record-keeping requirements more efficient.  Another option would be to join our creance team. 

Our volunteers are special people. They donate their free time, come out in all kinds of weather, and do whatever jobs need doing. They are the backbone of this organization. Find out more about volunteering in the How you can Help Section.

Our Voulunteer staff:
Jamie Baker, Christine Holda, Roger Judson, Liz Leach, Karen Morton, Karen Napoli, Jesse Kepple, Bill Jordan, Laura Jordan, Lynn Samples, Clint Samples, Debbie Parker, Steve Pavelka, Jessica Pelka, Annette Piechowski, Kathy Sowash, Laurel Cope, Tammy Simak, Lisa Romaniuk, Al Lang, Lou Gaeta

Educational Outreach

Our Educational Outreach Program continues to grow. We present about 100 programs a year. We provide programs to churches, 4-H and scouting groups, senior centers, libraries, and other community groups. We also enjoy a very special partnership with the Medina County Parks system, presenting a number of general programs on birds of prey and several owl walks.

The cornerstone to this program however is the local school systems. Each year, we present a number of programs to schools reaching over 1100 students. In addition, we host a number of tours and nature walks with honors classes and nature camps.

Take a look at the Educational Programs section for more details and a description of the "educational staff".

Rehabilitation Activities

We treat 200-300 birds and small mammals each year.  While the number of West Nile Virus cases dropped from the high of 82 in 2002, other problems such as wing injuries and "orphaned" songbirds more than made up the difference.

Rehabilitation is more than just providing medication to an injured bird.  We work with four excellent veterinarians who do X-rays, perform surgeries, and prescribe medication.  We provide the daily medication and monitoring at our facility to make sure that the bird is recovering mentally and physically.  When a bird no longer requires the close monitoring, it is moved to a recovery cage to allow it room for some limited flying.  Before release, we put the bird in a flight cage to see that it has the strength and stamina to fly in the wild.  We also condition the bird using live prey to ensure they know how to hunt on their own.  In some cases, we use creances to strengthen the birds.  Some birds are transferred to a falconer for training.  Additional information is in the Raptor News section.

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