"Eugene, Ore. - In a place where people regularly walk around with mouse guts and bird poop festooning their clothing, Sandy Jenness has the monopoly on gross. Every evening, she leaves work as a medical office assistant and drives up a winding mountain road to Cascades Raptor Center. Here, 30 volunteers spend dozens of hours a week scrubbing hawk feces and hand-feeding chunks of cut-up quail to owls, but none has it as bad as Ms. Jenness.

She's been training Lethe, a turkey vulture with a 6-foot wingspan and a beak that could hack off her finger, for six months. A woman with a passion for Renaissance frocks, a fairy tattoo on her calf, and long pink acrylic nails, she's been known to show up at the center in a frothy floral dress, strap the bird into the back seat of her Ford Focus, and drive around town, preparing him to travel to area schools, where he'll sit calmly on a perch while she discusses the allure of raptors in general, and turkey vultures in particular.

"Sometimes the car ride unnerves him and he throws up on my shirt," Jenness says of the unexpected consequence of a vulture's natural defense mechanism."

Read the rest of this essay, "Helping Hands to Injured Birds of Prey," from The Christian Science Monitor.