Bird Pursuit: Last Thursday before the holidays

Today was a good, but long day. By the end of it I was terribly sore to be honest, and super tired. I never seem to get enough sleep the night before, and last night was no exception. First things first I got my first sale, and the drawing is well on it's way to it's new home. My hope is that all the following pieces are up to this quality. I can't wait until I can do these without the copious use of references.

Now onto the days events. Overall it was a good day, and I managed to get better pictures of a few of the educational animals that didn't work with me last time.

First up when arriving today I was surprised to find that we had an unusually high number of volunteers. It turned out to be a scheduling error, and while it's not likely to happen again any time soon, it made all the daily stuff go by ridiculously fast. This meant I had the time to spend a little extra time with the education animals, and kind of observe them.

I started off with the usual cleaning of flights, and as I went to fill my cleaning bucket with water, I was surprised to find box turtles in the tub. We've had these turtles for a few months while we wait to find out what we're allowed to do with them. They're all painted with a number so we can keep track of them. (Non toxic paint, no worries.)

After a brief excursion it was on to cleaning the flights. I got a decent photo of FPL this time, who is usually a bit on the skittish side. He basically stayed in one place just long enough for me to get a couple shots off.

Now, it was on to Athena. While I'd been making progress with her, or so I thought, today took an interesting twist. She was her usual "chatty" self upon my entering of the flight. I snapped a couple quick pictures and decided to go about my cleaning because she will only tolerate the intrusion for so long. At one point I bent down to pick up a pellet, and upon standing and turning around to face her again I found her right up in my face. She seemed somewhat alarmed at first as I'd popped up pretty quick, having not expected her to be there. I guess she'd decided she was going to be sneaky and scooch her way closer while I wasn't looking. In any case she effectively had me cornered at that point, and I felt like she was too agitated for me to safely duck under her and make my way to the door, so I just kind of, well, stood there, and watched her, and she sat there and watched me. Stalemate. I ended up talking softly to her until she started to relax visibly. When I was sure she had calmed down enough (eyes half closed, and ear tufts nice and relaxed, and her plumage nice and loose instead of tightened up against her body, or puffed out in alarm,) that's when I used the opportunity to duck underneath her.

It's difficult to tell when looking through the lens of a camera, but she was incredibly close to me in these pictures. Here's a video I took at the time as well. I was stuck there, what else did I have to do?

You can kind of tell how close she actually was in this video. After I felt it was safe enough I was able to duck underneath her, and make my way out of the flight. I imagine she must have followed me to the door, as I found her up by the netting again when I came back outside a few minutes later.

She's such a silly bird. I really don't know what to do with her most of the time. I didn't necessarily feel threatened at this point, as she seemed more content just to watch, and be alert then anything else. The last couple times she did this she was definitely a lot more agitated, and kind of jumpy. It's actually quite normal for Great horned owls, along with several other species, to vigorously defend their nesting sites, and territory. Behavior like this is a great reminder that even after years in captivity, wild animals, are still inherently wild.

She's an amazingly expressive bird. Hopefully I've got enough camera fodder to draw her now, and I can leave her alone with the camera for a little while. I get the feeling she's not terribly excited about having her picture taken.

I have just a couple updated photos of Nanjiska, who's always right out in the open to be photographed, but kind of always has the same expression and posture. He's not terribly mobile so I imagine that has to do with it. I realized I could use the flash on him, and it really didn't change his demeanor much,(Quite on accident, mind you), so I got some better quality images. You can actually see the brilliant color of his eyes.

I caught him shortly after meal time, so he's got a little dried blood from breakfast left in his beak fuzz. He always looks so intense doesn't he? One of the cool things about snowy owls, that makes it easy to guess the sex (and I say guess as you can never truly know for sure without a blood test,) is that each time a male snowy owl goes through his molt his feathers will come back just a little bit whiter, whereas females will retain more of the dark barring typical to their plumage. If you see a snowy owl with a lot of dark plumage, chances are that the owl is either a female, or a juvenile of either sex. Male owls (In most species of owl, and other raptors for that matter,) tend to be smaller then females too. By this theory most of the owls used to play Hedwig in the Harry potter movies were actually male owls. Just a neat little factoid for you.

This time around I got some slightly better footage of our Merlin Skaska, but he really is such a skittish bird, and I would feel bad aggravating him. Most of the photos I take are from outside the flight, through the netting because he starts flying erratically back and forth, and climbing the netting. It's really not worth stressing him out so much.

I also got some great photos of Cetan, considering how dark his flight always is. I think it helped that I had a bit more light this time then I did last time.

I also had a small photo shoot with Chesmu, because Chesmu is just way too cute and photogenic not to have some good, characteristic photos.

Lastly on to the eagles that I COULD shoot. First up was the Eagle flight which now has a total of three eagles in it, all bald eagles. They're wary, naturally, so with my little point and shoot camera I couldn't get anything really amazing, (The flight is HUGE,) but I did get a few shots.

I did however get some good shots of Hanble Okiyan this time, as I found out she's not too nervous around a flashing camera. She did very well, and looked quite magestic.

Our visiting Wild Ones...

(Next I'll touch base on some of our current rehabilitation animals. These are animals that come to us sick, injured, or too young to care for themselves, and we take them in, nurse them back to health, and get them ready to enjoy their lives in the wild. I don't like to take pictures of these animals, as human contact can be stressful for a wild one.)

I cleaned a few squirrel flights today, later in the day. It's really funny to me how different each of the species we have is in personality. Our Eastern gray squirrels are your typical Washington squirrel. They're bold within reason, rambunctious, curious, and ravenous all the time. I have heard the strangest noises coming out of these little guys. Back one into a corner and you will have quite a fight on your hands, with lots of hissing, scratching and chittering. No pictures of these guys, but they're really common, all over the place.

Douglas squirrels are ridiculously bold, and courageous perhaps to a fault. They will get into anything and everything, chew things up, and eat anything remotely edible. They're really unique with their orange-brown bellies, and dark brown top-coat. They're also a bit smaller then Eastern Grays. I found myself doing a lot of shooing away of these little guys. One kept trying to climb up my pant leg.

The last type of squirrel we have currently is the flying squirrel. These little guys are incredibly cute, and the type of rodent that's more likely to huddle in a corner than get aggressive. They're nowhere near as adventurous as the others, at least not in an unfamiliar situation. They're also unique in the fact that they can glide, so to speak.

I also dropped in to see a couple of the other transient birds, and Osprey, and the Barred owl I helped tube a two or three weeks ago.

The barred owl I tubed not too long ago is doing fantastic it seems. I actually ran across a post by the girl who found him on a social media site, and was excited by the coincidence, so I took a few extra pictures and some video of him. He's such a chilled out little owl.