This is one of my favorite pictures, take many years ago. We seemed to get more screech owls than any other. They are tiny owls as you can see from the picture of this baby. When the golf courses around us would put out poison for the mice and rats, the unintended victims were screech owls that ate the mice. Often we were brought the babies that lost their parents.
This is one of my favorite pictures, take many years ago. We seemed to get more screech owls than any other. They are tiny owls as you can see from the picture of this baby. When the golf courses around us would put out poison for the mice and rats, the unintended victims were screech owls that ate the mice. Often we were brought the babies that lost their parents.
In order to provide a well balanced diet, we raised our own rats. I tried mice but found that the rats were easier to manage and produced more volume that I needed for all the raptors. For the baby raptors, I would finely chop a baby rat and feed with rounded forceps to approximate the mother feeding as much as possible. The primary goal in raising these babies is to NOT imprint them. We released the birds. I covered that in a blog about my “gentle release”.
This particular baby did very well and was eventually released to the wilds of Joe Pool Lake State Park.
