Six months into the year already?

Time flies when you’re having mice...err...fun...

The red shoulder who came in as a 24-hour-old ball of down is now in the mini-pen. He’s still iffy on the self-feeding, spoiled brat that he is, but he needed to be outside to have more room, so we’re compromising on the feeding issue.

The barred trio are now in the main flight and doing well; self-feeding was never an issue for any of them.

"Bat...barred...close enough..."

Monday an adult red shoulder came in, a bit loopy and with some road rash on his hip. Within a few days, he was ready for release. Typical red shoulder, he sat on the glove until I acted as if I was putting the camera away, and then...it's a short video, but hey...short is better than none, right?

Tuesday an adult great horned came in after a property owner saw it by his pond the previous night and fished it out of that pond Tuesday morning. He was not in good shape; he’d obviously aspirated a lot of water and was struggling to breathe. I started meds immediately, but by Wednesday he’d lost his struggle to survive.

And Friday morning a pre-fledge Cooper’s hawk came in, thin even for a Coop, but alert. He’s at just the wrong age to readily accept hand-feeding but doesn’t want to self-feed either, so it’s still a daily struggle to get him to eat—force-feeding leads to him vomiting most of it back up from stress, but he won’t eat on his own from the forceps nor self-feed from the dish of tasty rodent morsels placed in his box...He’s keeping down enough to remain alert and cast tiny pellets, but he literally falls over on his side, still gripping the perch, juvenile “panic-chipping” at me, when I go to check his food/feed him. Coops are stressy, psychotic little birds...in case that description of his behavior didn’t clue y’all in...