Oregon center strives for bird romance

GRANTS PASS, Ore. — It's a birds-and-bees kind of question that confronts a Southern Oregon wildlife organization: how to encourage some rare birds displaced by natural disasters to mate.

Workers at Wildlife Images in Josephine County have decided that more privacy is called for.

The nonprofit center is home to the only known pair of great black hawks in captivity in the United States, as well as a pair of tawny owls native to Europe and a couple of South American king vultures that so far haven't been showing much romantic spark, said Nora Silber, avian conservation-center coordinator.

"We're trying to figure out what we need to do to kind of make the love glow," she said.

Part of that includes reducing human interaction to give the birds some breeding privacy.

A donor came up with a large metal building to provide warm housing for the tropical birds, and the organization also got help designing a treehouse observatory so that people eventually could view birds without disturbing them.

The "condorminium," as it's dubbed by staff, is also home to a Eurasian eagle owl, Disaster, whose mate died of old age, and an Andean condor who doesn't yet have a mate.

The condor displayed persistent curiosity about those recently in the treehouse, and a goal is to replace the glass with a one-way variety so the birds wouldn't know when someone was watching, said Chip Weinert, fundraising coordinator.