Valley Record SNOQUALMIE
101RS YEA
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 4, 2015 n DAILY UPDATES AT WWW.VALLEYRECORD.COM n 75 CENTS
Making history Si View Community Center remodel starts with historic designation By CAROL LADWIG
LOCAL
Editor
North Bend royalty at work in local auto shop Page 2
The timing was comical. Just days after the Si View Community Center in North Bend was named to the National Register of Historic Places, crews began a remodel that will close the building down for months. Staff was nearly moved out by early February and all of the Si View Metropolitan Park District programming that is normally housed in the 77-year-old building had been set up in its new locations. “Oh, look, there’s the last piece of furniture to be moved out,” said Si View’s recreation programs supervisor Minna Rudd, on a recent tour of the building. A lone wooden desk sat along the wall of the otherwise empty room on the tour.
SPORTS
SEE HISTORY, 3
Mount Si grad travels country chasing his junior hockey dreams Page 10
INDEX Opinion 4 5 Puzzles On the Scanner 6 9 Calendar Classifieds 12-14
Vol. 101, No. 41
Allyce Andrew/Staff Photo
Children play dodgeball at the Si View after-school program, hosted by the Sallal Grange during a final phase of renovations at the Si View Community Center. The Si View fieldhouse was recently named to the National Register of Historic Places.
Sanctuary lost Macaw Rescue loses 50 rare birds in theft By ALLYCE ANDREW Staff Reporter
Bob Dawson runs the non-profit Macaw Rescue & Sanctuary in Carnation; a 20-acre sanctuary, plagued with a 50-bird heist on Sunday, Feb. 22. “The birds that were taken were typically smaller birds in some of the buildings closer to the road (up front),” Dawson explained in his home at the sanctuary on Friday, Feb. 27. Dawson said the sanctuary holds roughly 800 birds and is the largest Macaw sanctuary in Western Washington. It has nested in Carnation for 12 years, but hd said the theft is a first for him.
Allyce Andrew/Staff Photo
Bob Dawson stands in front of the Macaw Rescue & Sanctuary sign with his new security camera warnings. The stolen birds were: Blue quakers, parakeets from South America who were taken from a “flight” full of green birds; bareyed cockatoos, whose gender is determined from their eye color;
a pair of rose-breasted cockatoos; and Senegal, Meyers and red-bellied parrots that were targeted in a cockatoo house, that was home to 300 small birds for the winter months. Most birds were of the African species. Dawson explained smaller birds are easier to pick up and net at night, while bigger birds are louder and are more likely to bite. Transporting 50 birds takes about an hour for those familiar with proper handling. He suspects the systematic thieves are individuals he’s taken on a tour. “They knew what they were going for,” he stated. “This tells me that these people knew birds.” No dead birds or escapees were found around the perimeter, so the possibility that the birds simply escape was ruled out early on. Dawson has worked with birds since he was 6 years old, which explains why, when asked to pose for a photo, he apologizedfor not being able to smile much. He estimated the missing birds’ value at $10,000, which he called
a “conservative figure” compared to a retailer’s calculation. “I don’t deal in dollars,” Dawson explained. “At our sanctuary, when a bird comes to live with us, there’s no price on it — we don’t adopt out and we don’t place values on them… Macaws are about a buck and a quarter to take care of.” “When people place birds with us,” he said, “they become more or less a part of our family because they don’t relinquish them and sign them away. The people are contributors, some of them volunteer out here.” The city of Carnation is policed by the King County Sheriff ’s Department, which is on the thieves’ trail. “The theft of these birds is an exceptional crime. We have a detective working on the case,” said BJ Myers, sheriff ’s spokesperson, in a phone interview. “We’ve dealt with stolen animals, but certainly nothing on the magnitude of 50 or so rare birds.” SEE BIRDS, 5
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