Second Chances

Jean Daugherty’s mother began treating her as a drinking buddy at age eight, starting a path of self-destruction. By age fourteen, she’d begun using marijuana and cocaine. Many years later, when Daugherty saw her three-year-old daughter step from a bedroom with a razor blade and a straw in her tiny fingers, she realized she’d become her own mother and had to break the cycle. She had to give herself and her daughter a second chance.

Now, 22 years later, Daugherty has reached the end of a busy workday at the Cascades Raptor Center, a wildlife hospital and nature center hidden in the shady woods of Eugene, Oregon’s south hills. Among the solace of these trees, the most prominent sounds are the restless screes and wing-flaps of healing raptors who peer out of shadowy enclosures with curious eyes.

People bring a variety of sick and injured birds to the mostly-volunteer staff with the hope that they’ll be made whole again. Daugherty is one of those volunteers. Every year, she helps treat up to 200 birds, rehabilitating and releasing more than half of them. “We give them second chances,” Daugherty explains. “There’s nothing like being able to release a healed bird back into the wild.”

For the first few years of her sobriety, Daugherty’s life revolved around a twelve-step program and a women’s support group. They parented her, taught her about being a woman and mother, about life—all the things Daugherty never had growing up.

But when her daughter left home for college at age sixteen, things changed for Daugherty. She moved to Eugene to remarry and to attend graduate school, but something was missing. Even when she found an enjoyable job as a social worker, she still couldn’t find her spiritual center. She was conflicted. Without her daughter there, her sense of purpose was gone. “I was lost at sea—completely,” she says. But that changed when she discovered the Raptor Center.

With a variety of responsibilities, including staff support functions, Daughtery puts in an average of fifteen volunteer hours each week at the center. Each shift brings something new and it’s not uncommon for things to get chaotic. “Some days here can be absolutely exhausting,” she says. “There is always so much to do. Making sure visitors are getting their questions answered and are having a good experience, keeping track of the volunteers, making sure we work with the birds and everybody gets fed.”

Daughtery’s voice becomes almost hypnotic as she explains how being here makes her feel. “When I come up here,” she says, “there is a serenity I have never found in my life anywhere. The pace is different, the air is different, the sounds are different, everything. When I’m here, especially working with a bird, the rest of the world ceases to exist.”

Daugherty explains that her purpose is to help humans and animals and to leave the world better than she found it. She wants to give the raptors the same second chance she was granted.

“Life isn’t fair,” she says, “but we don’t give up or wallow in it. Fix what you can, work around the disabilities, and embrace the joy. All of that happens for me up here.”