Tuesday, June 12, 2007

You can lead a raptor to food.....


Today, while putting some program birds back, Melinda was there doing something with some of the rehab kestrels. She called out, "Susan? Do you have your camera?"
Well, heck yeah. I always have my camera.
"Bring it in here."
I grabbed my camera and went into the mew she was in.
(Sorry for the poor quality...the lighting was tricky in there)
And here is what was going on:

Raptor Fast Food
This is what you could call "Raptor Fast Food." A live mouse in the mew with two kestrels.
Make that SEVEN live mice in the mew.
Melinda was doing some live prey training. These kestrels are young ones, and the urge to kill and eat a wiggly mouse is supposed to be instinctive.
This is how they did:
You want me to EAT THIS
"You want me to EAT this???? It's still moving!"

This mouse is SMELLING me!
"Help me, you laughing humans! This mouse is SMELLING ME!!!!!!"
To be fair to the kestrels, they may have tore into the mice after Melinda and I left.
But it was just too funny and cute to watch these happy little mice crawling all over these fierce predators!


This is a ringing endorsement for Zick Dough:
One of the presumably younger chickadees sampled the fresh suet tonight as Nellie and I sat about 10 feet away. The other chickadees are a little bit smarter than that.
GULP!
Click on the photo to enlarge...you can see the little ball of suet going down!
I hope to have some really cool pictures for tomorrow's post.
Hint: It has to do with birds of prey. That's all I am gonna say.

7 comments:

DK & The Fluffies said...

Mwahahahahahaha

Mary said...

Those captions crack me up! The poor kestrel obviously looked confused. I would love to know if they ever ate!

Cute chickadee photo, Susan.

Anonymous said...

This is wonderful to see how your training the birds in being released back into the wild! Keep these great post coming!

Lynne at Hasty Brook said...

Hilarious captions!!

NatureWoman said...

Heck Susan your posts and pics are cool everyday!! Oh, I so have to make some Zick dough.

entoto said...

Peaceful co-existence in raptor land. Very interesting! And the look on the kestrel's face. I am SOOO glad you shared that with us.

Beth said...

Too funny! I was preparing myself to be grossed out by a Kestrel Nightmare on Elm Street sort of thing; but that was AWESOME!