My Birthday goes to the Birds

Well today marks the passing of another year of life. I am past the age where you get really excited about birthdays so I do not really do much to celebrate. A couple of years back, 2007, I had a great birthday, if you would like to read about it click here. Last year I spent most of my birthday working, Tuesdays I work two jobs. This year I decided to spend my time with some new friends.

So I headed over to The Raptor Center after work for my normal Wednesday volunteer shift. The afternoon was pretty busy. We started with a program for fifty pre-kindergartners. Since I have not done a program for this age group yet one of the other volunteers did the program while I did all of the handling. For the show we had 3 birds, Lois, a great horned owl, Alula, a red-tailed hawk, and Cinnamon, an American Kestrel. Cinnamon is the fifth bird that I started working with and she is one of my favorites. Kestrels have always been one of my favorite birds and having this little girl on my glove is a special thing for me.

After the program we had a lot of people who stopped in for tours. So I took out a couple of tours and then I went back to feed the three birds from the program and return them to their mews. By this time it was getting late so I did not get a chance to work with my sixth bird. Whisper is an American barn owl. The challenge with working with Whisper is that she frequently gets distracted because she has such exceptional hearing that she hears things that are happening in the other rooms of the building.
Finally things calmed down and I went to work helping to get the remaining education birds fed but since it was my birthday the staff had a couple of surprises for me. First I got to help feed some of the baby birds that they are working at rehabilitating. The second surprise of the afternoon was that I got to begin working with a new bird. This is Kettle he is a broad-winged hawk. Kettle came to us when he was an immature bird because he was shot with a bee bee gun while he was in the nest. Unfortunately one of the bee bees is lodged in his head and it is too risky to try and remove it. This has made Kettle some what difficult to handle because he does not follow the typical bird handling rules and is much more unpredictable then many of our other education birds. He will certainly be a challenge for me and one that I am looking forward to.