Adventure at the Refuge

I was at the Refuge last night for my regular weekly round of getting everyone clean and fed and medicated and to sleep after work. In addition to the 50 or 60 parrots in the house, we have a resident red-tailed hawk named Pierce in the backyard aviary. She has an amputated wing and cannot survive in the wild. The picture is Pierce with Rich, our director.

Pierce eats quail. And sometimes small mammals, but I don't want to talk about that. Pierce was sitting on her lowest perch, by her door. I don't know her really well, but I think this means she is hungry. The daily notes said she was fed this morning, but I think she is still hungry.

I am squeamish about feeding her. First, because once when she was really hungry, she literally came out of the aviary to grab a quail from me. Rich told me that he was working on hand feeding her so that wouldn't happen so much. But my real problem is that I think touching dead quail is icky.

I checked with the other volunteers, because some people think feeding the hawk is the coolest thing ever. No luck. I am glad no one was watching as I picked up the bag of quail, dropped one into a paper towel and picked up the towel to take to Pierce.

I made sure that Pierce couldn't see that I was bringing her food. She very politely jumped up to a higher perch so that I could leave my offering and back away slowly. I closed up the aviary and she went right for it.

Ha.