I'm a bird?

Imprinted 17-year old female Northern Harrier, a resident of a raptor rehabilitation facility. "Imprinted" means she does not recognize that she is a harrier, and associates humans as her kind instead. Imprinted raptors can be unpredictable and dangerous because they are unafraid of people, but she has always been a sweet, albeit infantile, girl. She begs incessantly at mealtimes and gets underfoot as you try to open the door of her cage, but she's never attacked, bitten, or otherwise tried to harm anyone, which is atypical of raptors illegally raised as pets and imprinted.

Imprinted birds cannot be released into the wild, because they do not know how to behave like birds and are often a danger to themselves or others. Most wild raptors kept illegally go straight from the home of the person who thought it would make a neat pet to a place that has the permits and knowledge to house unreleasable birds of prey. A few are shoved back into the wild without any of the necessary skills for survival once their captor realizes 1) what an awful pet an imprinted raptor makes or 2) that they might get caught and fined. These birds tend to die of starvation, or make a nuisance of themselves harassing humans for food until they are caught. The injury done to these poor birds is psychological, not physical. Unlike the other raptors that come to the rehabilitation center, they have no chance of ever being released.