Salem resident Laurel Milmore didn’t realize she was in the direct flight path of a female Harris’s hawk until it zipped past her right shoulder during the High Desert Museum’s “Raptors in the Desert Sky” program and she ducked to get out of its way.

“I was thinking to myself, ‘Should I really be standing here?’” said Milmore, who could feel the air disturbed by the hawk’s extended wings rush past her head like a breeze.

“I was also thinking, ‘Is she going to poop on me?’ because that’s the real danger.”

For the past three summers, the museum’s raptors in flight demonstration program has thrilled spectators by giving them a chance to see falcons, hawks, owls and vultures fly from one perch to another at a 2-acre clearing on the museum’s wooded grounds. The show is only offered May through Labor Day. The birds of prey that take part in the show — none of which could survive on their own in the wild — also benefit from the program because it gives them a chance to get some exercise and earn some treats.

The female Harris’s hawk that flew by Milmore and her friends was one of five raptors Curator of Natural History John Goodell and his team of trainers sent flying across the clearing during Monday’s show.

“Raptors are birds that grab their food with their feet,” Goodell said as he narrated the 30-minute presentation over a wireless microphone.

Goodell told a crowd of about a dozen spectators the broad category of birds he was referring to includes owls, which hunt during the night, falcons, which have thin tapered wings and can reach speeds of up to 200 miles per hour, and vultures, which feed off the carcasses other animals have left behind.

These animals tend to fall victim to road strikes because they swoop in fast and low to the ground as they chase after prey or approach road kill he said. Lead poisoning is also a problem for the scavengers because they can ingest bullet fragments when eating carcasses that hunters have left behind.

While Goodell continued his lesson, his team of raptor trainers darted from one perch to another in the clearing as they guided the pair of Harris’s hawks through a route they had practiced before. They do the same with a peregrine falcon, which is the fastest type of raptor, and a white barn owl that had a heart-shaped face designed to funnel sound directly to its ears.

But the real star of the show was a turkey vulture that lived in captivity all of its life and for a few moments had a chance to be free.

The vulture

Goodell said somebody found the turkey vulture when it was very young and most likely had fallen out of its nest.

Wanting to do the right thing, he said, the vulture’s rescuer took the bird to a wildlife rehabilitator so it could get the care it needed.

But Goodell said this caused a problem for the vulture, because “it’s very difficult to raise (wild birds) without imprinting them.”

Because the bird had been around humans for so much of its life, Goodell said, it never fully developed the instincts it needed to survive in the wild.

When the High Desert Museum found out about the vulture’s condition, it agreed to house the bird and feature it in its afternoon in-flight demonstrations. Goodell and his trainers spent about two months working with the bird as they taught it how to fly from perch to perch.

Every other bird featured in the show has a similar story and had either been kept in captivity (like the peregrine falcon that was used in a captive breeding program) or had been injured (like a Swainson’s hawk that was blind in one eye).

Behind the scenes, the museum’s staff feed these animals a diet Vice President of Programs Dana Whitelaw said is strictly controlled and intended to keep the animals at their “peak level of performance.” The museum’s staff also routinely weighs the birds and records this information on a dry erase board complete with detailed directions for each bird’s care.

Giving these animals a chance to fly from perch to perch before a crowd that could number 150 people in the peak season is just part of this care routine, Goodell said. And in return, the birds seize the spotlight and run away with the show.

At least that’s what happened with the turkey vulture.

The surprise

When Goodell and his trainers let the vulture out of its cage Monday, the animal glided overhead just high enough to cast a shadow on the ground. It struck poses on each of its perches and held them long enough so any spectator who had a camera could get a shot.

But something happened near the end of this route, and instead of flying back into its cage, the bird flapped its wings and disappeared into the forest.

“Here’s a chance to look at the turkey vulture’s flight path,” Goodell said as he continued his lessons while watching one of his birds fly away. “It’s got a very noticeable dihedral (a body position with wings tilted up to grab onto air currents) and hopefully it will come back.”

Goodell, his trainers and the crowd watched the turkey vulture as it flew in and out of the two-acre performance area where the show was based. Sometimes they tracked it by its shadow and other times the animal could be spotted from where it had stopped in a nearby tree.

Goodell said he could have spooked the bird when he accidentally walked into its flight path. Another turkey vulture had been spotted flying overhead, he said, explaining that also meant there could have been a dead animal in a nearby clearing that was just outside the crowd’s sight.

But regardless of what caused it to go off script, the turkey vulture flew back into the performance area immediately after the museum’s trainers activated the animal’s telemetry scanner so they could track its movements with their radio devices. The trainers guided the animal back into its cage before a handful of spectators who stayed to watch the vulture’s recovery as if its disappearance had been part of the show.

“Sometimes things can be a little exciting,” Whitelaw said, adding unscripted antics like the vulture’s disappearance are sometimes part of the show.

She said there was one time when an “unfortunate ground squirrel” wandered into the demonstration area halfway through a performance only to be picked up and eaten by a raptor that had veered off its choreographed route to get a late afternoon snack.

“The crowd loved it,” she said, recalling the horror of this unscripted event. “They applauded.“