NEW YORK - New Yorkers share the city with the hundreds of species of wildlife that also call it home, and among those New Yorkers are different groups who work to help injured animals. Amina Martin is a licensed New York State wildlife rehabilitator. For 15 years, she estimates to have worked with more than 1,000 birds, sharing her rescues with devoted followers on social media.
Her most common calls are for injured pigeons. "Pigeons, they have such a bad reputation and I feel bad because people treat them so nasty," she says. She scoops some bird feed and tosses it out her window onto a neighboring rooftop, as dozens of pigeons come to eat.
"But they are beautiful birds," she adds. A symphony of squawks and and screeches comes from a flock of pigeons, a group of parakeets, a morning dove and an old parrot taking up residence in Martin's apartment. "Injured birds, they are everywhere on the street.
You know, whenever I walk on the street, my eyes are already trained. I don't look at the cars, I don't look at the people, I look at the birds," she tells CBS New York's Hannah Kliger. Many of the birds in Martin's Bay Ridge apartment are up for adoption because they're no longer able to live on their own.
Others will be released when they're ready. One by one, she introduced the flock living in her home, like Elmore, an abandoned 21-year-old parrot struggling to regrow his feathers. Or a pigeon run over by a car, missing a leg and part of its tail.
"I know how to fix, you know, .