For anyone who isn’t familiar with our operations, any bird that stays at Flint Creek Wildlife longer than 48 hours goes into outdoor caging prior to release. This lets the birds acclimate to being outdoors and recondition their breast muscles – all under our watchful eye to make sure nothing goes wrong.
Anyway, almost two weeks ago we transferred seven Great Horned Owls into a large flight chamber in anticipation of their release. Several days later, we started hearing a juvenile Great Horned making a food-begging noise from nearby trees. (We knew that our neighborhood Great Horned Owls had at least one baby this year, but we hadn’t seen or heard him in quite a long time.)
One of the adults in the flight chamber started calling back to the baby. It was the coolest thing!
Dawn