We walked into the Eagle Center just as an employee (or maybe volunteer) was bringing out Angel the bald eagle for photo ops. Of course we took advantage of that.
We looked at a few of the exhibits, but really we just wanted to see the feeding demo. Terp went in to save a couple seats while I took some photos of the eagles in their viewing area.
Sadly, the feeding demo was at the end of an hourlong talk, which featured a lot of info but became somewhat tedious after about 30 minutes. Even more sadly, the feeding wasn't all that exciting, consisting mainly of watching an eagle stand on a piece of meat and rip shred off with its beak. There were a couple of good moments, like when it dropped the meat and then just stared at it like it wasn't sure what to do now. And when it grabbed a piece of meat but then had major issues trying to get its foot on top of it.
Running short on time, we bailed out about a minute before the program ended and hit the road. Thanks to my fancy driving we made it to Whitewater with a few minutes to spare and watched them set up the mist net to catch some birds. In no time they had their first catch, a woodpecker of some sort.
After our demonstrator talked about the bird for awhile and described the bird banding program, etc. she asked for a volunteer to take the bird outside and release it. I don't know who this is, but he jumped up and grabbed that poor woodpecker by the neck and bolted for the door with this goofy smile on his face. The look on the demonstrator's face is priceless: like she's wondering who let the weird bird guy into the program? She's obviously pushing him away and hoping he gets locked outside.
Anyway, the demo went on and was very interesting. By the way, I don't remember the demonstrator's name nor the exact names of the birds, so she will be referred to as "she" and the birds as "the bird" or "birds". Very scientific and detail oriented, I know.
So, she talked about each different type of bird as she pulled them out of the little bird holder thing (another technical term) and was able to keep me interested the entire time, which is not easy to do. The woodpeckers and some other kind of bird (nuthatch maybe?) did not appreciate the attention and pecked at her hand constantly, whereas the littler guys (goldfinches and ??) were much quieter. Those birds were able to be hypnotized - once in hand, just tip them downward for about 30 seconds and they would lie there motionless, even after opening your hand. I had one in my open hand for a couple minutes and was able to transfer it to Terp's hand without it moving at all.
It's not dead, trust me.
Terp waited and waited and got to release the last woodpecker. This time he waited for me to take a proper photo of the occasion.
Following that, we watched a short video on the 2007 flood at the park which closed it down for many months, and then got on the road to come home. Thumbs up for the bird banding, not so much for the eagle center.
More photos here.
No comments:
Post a Comment