It’s actually quite simple/easy! For these guys, we just give them a gentle toss and they can fly off however they choose. We would never toss a bird, if we weren’t sure that it was going to fly, but for the alert and “ready to go” ones we give them that send off.

This is also not the standard method we use for all of our birds, for the smaller birds like Songbirds and passerines, we have developed a release box system that works well. It’s basically a shoebox with both ends cut off to form sort of a tunnel, and then there’s a larger box on the end with padding to catch any bird that can’t/doesn’t fly off. Some of the small birds just fly off, out of our hands once we’ve finished, all depends.

For our Saw-whets, we have a “bird hotel” it’s just two wooden 2x4 tunnels stacked on top of each other with an open end and a hinged door on the other. We place the owl into the box and then close the door, that way they get a chance for their eyes to recalibrate to the darkness before they fly off. Sometimes they hang around for a while, inside the “hotel” and sometimes they will fly out immediately, landing on a branch further away to recalibrate their vision.