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Missing raven reunited with handlers after spending weeks at Utah Capitol

Missing raven reunited with handlers after spending weeks at Utah Capitol

(Courtesy of Tracy Aviary)


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SALT LAKE CITY — About a month ago, a friendly raven mysteriously showed up and perched outside the Utah Capitol near the Utah Attorney General’s office and befriended some staff, according to a news release from Rich Piatt, communications director for the AG office.

Some people in the office even started calling the bird “Edgar,” after the famous poet, Edgar Allan Poe who wrote the poem “The Raven.”

Little did they know, that a few miles away at Tracy Aviary, the bird’s handlers were devastated with her disappearance and were busy scouring the valley looking for the lost animal named Cash.

“Wonderful,” said Tim Brown, CEO of Tracy Aviary, of the moment they retrieved Cash.

Before Cash had shown up outside of the AG’s window, she had been out with her handlers on a roaming encounter, according to Brown. A roaming encounter is when a handler will take a bird around the aviary’s grounds to interact with guests, Brown explained.

On this encounter, some hawks had bullied Cash, prompting her to abandon her routine and fly away to find safety in a tree. She kept flying farther and farther away until handlers lost track of her, he said.

“We had been looking all over the place our bird show team was doing an incredible job of chasing down any sightings of ravens,” Brown said.

After weeks of chasing leads with dead ends, Helen Dishaw, curator of Tracy Aviary’s bird show, had started to lose hope. In her more than 15 years of free flying birds, Dishaw said she’d never lost one before Cash.

“Ultimately, we'd all but given up on finding her, to our utter heartbreak,” Dishaw said in a statement. “Not knowing where she was, if she was still alive, or what happened to her was one of the worst things I've ever gone through — truly worse than the death of one of our birds as far as the torment, lack of closure, and just overall sadness and sense of loss.”

Then the unexpected happened — Tracy Aviary received a call Saturday from the attorney general’s office, saying they knew of a raven that matched the “missing raven.” According to Dishaw’s statement, the caller said the bird showed up between 3 and 4 p.m. every day to hangout on the balcony outside their office.

Dishaw tried not to get her hopes up as they went to see if the AG’s new friend really was the missing Cash.

But moments after arriving at the capitol, Dishaw spotted Cash up on the balcony and the bird flew down to Dishaw’s arm within a minute, she recounted in the statement.

The entire recovery process was over in less than five minutes, Dishaw said in the statement.

Cash was in good shape when she returned to the aviary and will continue to participate in regular bird shows and roaming encounters, Brown said.

“Everybody should come down and say hi to Cash,” he said.

While Piatt said in the news release they’ll miss Cash, he pointed out now they can visit her at her home anytime.

“For a few weeks, Cash managed to work her way into the lives of the people in our office who always wondered why she would just hop from the rail to the window and hang out, looking at the people on the other side of the glass,” Piatt said in the news release. “We snapped pictures, left croutons for her to eat, enjoyed her friendly presence. Cash entranced tourists who also noticed this unusual sight.”

Contributing: Dan Bammes, KSL NewsRadio.

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Lauren Bennett is a reporter with KSL.com who covers Utah’s religious community and the growing tech sector in the Beehive State.

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