All eyes were on the golden eagle, which perched on the leather sheath on Anne Price’s left arm, occasionally flapping its 6-foot wings and gazing right back at the staring kids.
The bird had a supporting cast: a barred owl, a red-tailed hawk and a burrowing owl scarcely bigger than a soda can. But the eagle was the star, and Price found herself in a teaching moment.
“This eagle is a female that’s almost 28 years old,” Price said. “It was only 2 weeks old when loggers cut down the tree it was nesting in outside Bozeman, Mont. The people who rescued it hand-fed it, which they should not have done, because it got used to the company of humans and never learned to hunt on its own.
“That’s why she’s with us.”
“Us” is the Raptor Education Foundation, a nonprofit group based in Brighton that takes in large avian predators that cannot fend for themselves in the wild.
A big part of foundation’s mission is educating the public about the birds, which inhabit a world where humans have a growing disconnect with nature and its cycles.
So from Thursday through Sunday, the group was at the Denver International Sportsmen’s Exposition at the Colorado Convention Center. If you walked by the scores of booths dedicated to big-game hunting in Nairobi and salmon fishing in Alaska — and the array of T-shirts where PETA turned out to be an acronym for “People Eating Tasty Animals” — you found Price and the birds.
“Seeing live wildlife is important,” said Price, the foundation’s curator of raptors. “Kids need to experience wild animals up close — not as a picture, not as a mount, not as a moving image on the screen.”
Price’s fascination lies with raptors. It has been that way since 1980, when as a 12-year-old she volunteered at a wildlife park in San Francisco, where she grew up.
She joined the Raptor Education Foundation in 1986, six years after its founding, after enrolling at the University of Colorado at Boulder to study biology.
“Watching how raptors watch the world gives me insight into who I am and into who other people are,” Price said. “People use the expression ‘birdbrain.’ Nothing could be further from the truth.”
The foundation’s facility has 28 birds. “We don’t get them unless they’re deemed unreleasable,” Price said.
The raptors have a home until they die, and it’s not unusual for captive eagles to live into their 50s.
The foundation, which is licensed by the Colorado Division of Wildlife, is supported by donations, sundry corporate sponsorships and its program fees. With 20 volunteers and three staffers, it makes about 200 public appearances a year.
In April, partnering with the Division of Wildlife, the group traveled to Manhattan, where it turned Madison Square Park into 5 acres of Colorado. “That was fun,” Price said. “The birds were a big hit. You can’t exactly take an elk to New York City.”
Noon was approaching and Price’s arm was tired from serving as a roost for the 11-pound eagle. She passed the bird off to Peter Reshetniak, the group’s founder.
The eagle flapped its wings and did a full down-and-up swing on Reshetniak’s glove. It was like watching a feathered Mary Lou Retton doing a rotation on a gymnastic bar. The children jumped.
“These birds are unbelievable,” Price said. “A kid doesn’t forget something like this.”
Reach William Porter at wporter@denverpost.com or 303-954-1877.
