Helen Greenberg Is an Angel of Life for Raptors

Helen Greenberg estimates that she’s rescued about 300 wild raptors in the past five years.

When a baby owl falls from its nest, when a red-tailed hawk swoops into oncoming traffic, when a black vulture breaks its wing, Greenberg climbs into her Subaru and drives across town to pick it up. Greenberg is a volunteer with the American Wildlife Refuge (AWR), a Raleigh-based nonprofit that rescues and rehabilitates birds of prey. 

Sitting across from me in a booth at the Wegmans Burger Bar (her suggestion), Greenberg’s silver hair is swept into a low ponytail beneath a denim baseball cap. She wears gold-rimmed eyeglasses and walks with a cane. As she speaks animatedly about raptors, her owl-shaped earrings bounce to and fro.

“In the beginning, I was really afraid of the birds,” she tells me. “I mean, they’re big, they’re aggressive, they’re everything you want to stay away from.”

Back in 2019, Greenberg signed up to volunteer with the AWR on a whim. A longtime animal lover who keeps parrots at home, the idea of working with raptors piqued her interest. She learned that the AWR rescues and rehabs hundreds of hawks, eagles, owls, falcons, kites, and vultures around the Triangle each year. They range in size from tiny screech owls that fit in the palm of a hand to majestic bald eagles with seven-foot wingspans. From the largest to the smallest, these carnivorous hunters have evolved hooked beaks, lethal talons, and sharp eyes to track their prey.

Most urban dwellers don’t spend much time thinking about raptors (with the notable exception of the internet’s favorite raptor, Flaco, the eagle owl who managed to survive in New York City for a year after escaping from the Central Park Zoo). But for Greenberg, they’ve become a passion. After connecting with the AWR, she began attending training sessions, practiced holding raptors from the refuge’s bird sanctuary, and then started tagging along for rescues. 

“Now,” Greenberg laughs, “they call me fearless. I don’t know why!” 

She’s being modest. Two visits to urgent care for raptor-related injuries in a five-year span have done nothing to diminish her enthusiasm for working with birds of prey. 

One of those visits was set in motion when the AWR dispatched Greenberg to an apartment complex to investigate a black vulture in distress. It had been stranded there a week with a broken wing and needed to see an exotic animal vet.

Black vultures are massive—their wingspans sometimes surpass five feet—and they can run up to 20 miles per hour. It took an hour to chase this one down, Greenberg said. Finally, she was able to take hold of its body and feet with her gloved hands, while a woman from the apartment complex held its hooked beak shut. As Greenberg guided the vulture into a crate for transport, the other woman let go too soon. The bird whipped around and latched its beak into Helen’s chest, ripping her skin.

“While he was hanging on, I was trying to put my fingers through his mouth, you know, trying to release him. He wouldn’t release,” she says. “He had to do it on his own time.” 

She shrugs the whole episode off as a pesky occupational hazard: “It was my fault. He was scared. He didn’t know what was going on, that we were trying to help him.”

“Everybody hates vultures,” she adds incredulously. “They’re the cleanest birds we have. Black vultures have no feathers on their face. Why? Because when they go into a carcass, then their face doesn’t get all messed up. Their feathers don’t get messed up. When the sun comes out, they spread their wings to get rid of all the insects. And they clean—their stomach is like steel. They can eat all these deadly diseases, and it comes out fine.”

Greenberg has plenty more stories like this one. She once rescued an injured barred owl from the I-40 median during a downpour, with cars shooting past her in the fast lane. She’s rescued huge eagles and tiny baby birds. On the day we met, she warned me that she might need to leave, as she was “on call” for the wildlife refuge. 

Most of the bird injuries Greenberg sees are human-caused and avoidable. Ninety percent, she says, happen when a person throws litter—an apple core or banana peel, maybe—out of a car window. A small animal will go to eat the litter, and a raptor will dive for the animal. They don’t have peripheral vision, so they don’t see the oncoming traffic. Other times, birds get sick from ingesting rat poison or from eating from an animal carcass that’s been shot with a lead bullet. 

Best case scenario, Greenberg or another volunteer will rescue the bird, take it to the vet, and then bring it back to the AWR’s farm in Clayton to recuperate and eventually be released back into the wild. But sometimes the injury or sickness is untreatable, and the bird must be euthanized. Greenberg is pragmatic about this reality: not every bird can be saved. But she does wish people would stop throwing litter out car windows.

When Greenberg tells me that the carnivorous predators she works with don’t scare her, I somehow believe her. Her cheerful demeanor and natural modesty camouflage a fierceness below the surface. She has a tenacity about her reminiscent of her beloved wild birds.

Last year, she was in a head-on collision that sent her to the ER and totaled her car. Undeterred, she bought a new car and has kept on driving, logging hundreds of miles between her home in Durham and the Raptor refuge. Months earlier, she had lost her husband, Mark, a fellow animal lover who used to accompany her on rescue missions. 

He also loved the work, she says: “That was the greatest thing in his life.” 

Without him, she has continued volunteering on her own. She’s currently on call seven days a week for the birds. Soon, she plans to get her own rehabilitation permit and build cages in her backyard so she can care for wounded wild birds at home.

“My job is so awesome,” she tells me with a big smile. “I just can’t think of anything else that would be so rewarding as this.”

Reach Reporter Chloe Courtney Bohl at [email protected]. Comment on this story at [email protected].