Parks helps rehabilitate Electra, a young red-tailed hawk suffering from spinal trauma.Alix Parks had been hiking on Signal Mountain when her destiny fell from the sky and landed at her feet: a disoriented baby grackle, sticky with blood after being dropped by a red-tailed hawk passing overhead. As a child, Parks had often cared for orphaned squirrels or opossums, but she had no experience with birds.
Still she brought the fledgling home. She spent the spring season nursing it back to health. The grackle became her companion. When Parks took hikes, the bird followed along in the treetops above her. At night, it slept on a perch in her kitchen. One day, Parks noticed another grackle landing on a nearby tree and peering through her window.
She decided to find the flock. Parks climbed onto her bicycle, her grackle perched on her shoulder, and rode through town until she found the birds in a thicket of trees by Thrasher Elementary School. Every day after, she peddled her grackle back to the flock. The grackle would go sit with the other birds, but it always returned to her shoulder. Until the day it did not.
“The flock accepted him so he went with them. I had him about a year. That was too long, but I didn’t know back then,” says Parks.
Twenty years later, Parks is the matriarch of Happinest Wildlife Rehabilitation & Rescue, a nonprofit organization that rehabs raptors, songbirds and small mammals. In 2012, Parks co-founded Happinest with her mentee Sherry Teas. In 2015, the two finally turned their partnership into a nonprofit.