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CANFIELD — For decades, Birds in Flight Sanctuary has operated within a relatively confined space, but since last year, the organization has been able to rapidly and expansively spread its wings.
“We moved here last year,” Heather Merritt, the sanctuary’s founder and director, said.
Since its establishment in 1991, Birds in Flight had about 1 acre in Howland to fulfill its mission of rescuing, rehabilitating and providing medical care to sick, injured and orphaned birds of prey and waterfowl. Then it expanded to many other types of wildlife. With assistance, the sanctuary was able to buy 80 acres in 2022, she explained.
Much of Birds in Flight’s property at 8095 Columbiana-Canfield Road also was the site of Saturday’s inaugural open house.
Besides bald eagles and many other kinds of birds, the sanctuary works with injured squirrels, rabbits, nonpoisonous snakes and fawn.
“The wildlife has been injured in one way or another,” Merritt said. “It can be sick, orphaned, hit by a car, anything like that.”
The facility serves 42 Ohio counties and can assist sanctuaries in 13 counties in Pennsylvania if they experience overflow challenges. Birds in Flight is licensed to transport wounded wildlife over the Ohio-Pennsylvania line, Merritt noted.
On its 80 acres, the sanctuary also has five educational centers, which separately house a bald eagle, a barred owl, a turkey vulture, a Harris’s hawk and a red-tailed hawk as permanent exhibits, Cameron Merritt, the center’s educational director who also is Heather Merritt’s son, said.
Plans are in the works to acquire 15 additional such buildings, he added.
The sanctuary’s educational pillar is vital to its mission largely because many people fear wildlife, even though humans and animals have to cohabitate in the wild, he explained.
For example, Cameron said many people have disdain for turkey vultures, even though they serve the valuable purpose of eating vermin and animal carcasses, which can carry and spread botulism, rabies and other fatal diseases. Without such birds, diseases could spread through the food chain, he continued.
Birds in Flight also intends to host educational days in area schools beginning next spring. Cameron said the Canfield and South Range school districts already are on board, although plans are to include other interested schools as well.
“We want to expand it to as many schools as we can,” he said. “Besides rehabilitation, education is a passion of ours.”
Heather Merritt said that animals undergoing surgeries and other forms of rehabilitation on-site are off limits to the public, in accordance with state and federal law. It also is crucial that they stay wild and don’t lose their natural and innate fear of people.