Our mission
Put birds of prey back in the sky, and pay for the people who know how.
A raptor that cannot fly has not been rescued. It has been detained. Restoring flight is the entire job, and it is expensive, technical work.
Birds of prey are hard to rehabilitate. They are large, powerful, easily stressed, and the injuries they arrive with — fractured wings, severed tendons, degloved skin, septicaemia — sit at the difficult end of veterinary medicine. A raptor also cannot be released half-fixed. A songbird with a slight wing deficit may cope. An eagle that cannot hunt will starve.
That means raptor rehabilitation demands surgical capability, anaesthesia, imaging, long recovery periods and large flight aviaries. It is the most resource-hungry corner of wildlife rescue, and in most of the world it is funded by almost nobody.
We exist to change that arithmetic at the specific places where the skill already exists and only the money is missing.
What we do
Four things, and nothing else.
Fund treatment directly
We make grants to raptor rescue organisations that admit, treat and release birds of prey. Not awareness campaigns. Not conferences. The clinic floor.
Fund the research behind it
Better surgical technique saves more birds than more cages do. We support the documentation, publication and teaching of methods that other rehabilitators can adopt.
Give American donors a lawful route
A US taxpayer cannot deduct a gift sent directly to a foreign charity. As a 501(c)(3) exercising independent control over our grants, we make that support both possible and deductible.
Look for the next partner
Raptor rehabilitation across South and Southeast Asia is chronically underfunded. Our long-term intention is to support more than one facility.
Where the money goes today
One partner, chosen carefully.
They were not chosen because a film was made about them. They were chosen because they are, by volume of raptors received, the largest facility of their kind anywhere — and because they developed a surgical repair for the injury that dominates their caseload and then taught it to the wider field rather than keeping it.
Concentrating on one partner keeps our costs near zero and our oversight real. As our income grows, we intend to add partners — carefully, and on the same evidence.
How we operate
The commitments we hold ourselves to.
We fund people who were already doing the work
We do not start clinics. We find the ones that have already proven themselves over years — with case registers, outcomes and a reputation among their peers — and we take a funding problem off their desk.
Release rate is the measure that counts
Admissions are easy to grow and easy to publicise. What matters is how many birds fly away afterwards. We ask our partners for outcome data, not intake numbers.
We publish what we can substantiate
Where we quote a figure, it comes from an audited account, a filed return or a partner's own case register — and we say which. We would rather look less impressive than be imprecise.
Overhead stays low, and what we do pay we disclose
We have no American office and no fundraising staff. Our President and Treasurer serve without compensation. Our Secretary receives an honorarium — he is the co-founder who runs the clinic in Delhi, so that money reaches the work rather than sitting in US administration. The figure is on our Form 990, which anyone can read.
Small charity. Narrow remit. Public books.
Raptor Rescue and Research Inc. is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, EIN 87-3289299. You can read our IRS filing, see what we raised and what we spent, and decide for yourself whether we are worth your money.
Questions first? Write to us.