That’s a nice enclosure for rehab. I wonder how they get at it for treatment.
Do they just let mice loose in the enclosure and let the owl do it’s thing?
I’m not sure about this little one. I haven’t seen anyone remove our Screech Owls yet. I have yet to see them during normal business, they are quite reclusive.
One time when I was visiting a place, they had a new Barred Owl (which may have been the cutest Barred I’ve ever seen!) and he had a lady in with him who was trying to basically crate train him as one would a puppy. Owls are a bit stubborn and not near as food motivated as a cat or dog, but she did manage to get him into the crate a few times, and she said that was how they transported him to the office for his exams.
We don’t have any live prey animals, well, not ones meant to be eaten on site, because little mice still don’t want to make that noble sacrifice to benefit the owls and such, and that can lead to injuries from bites of scratches to the animals looking for their meals. I was going through all the freezers looking for what they were calling cockrels (baby rooster) but that is not how they are labeled on the bags! So I spent way too much time looking at everything we keep on hand. We have mice and rats of all sizes, chickens of many sizes, quail in 2 sizes I think, and probably some other things I can’t remember. I got to learn they take foooooorever to thaw if nobody does it ahead of time, thanks night shift! 😇
Ah, so that answers another question. Snakes can be notoriously picky about eating carrion - anything that isn’t alive. A roommate of mine long ago had a boa of some sort, and he basically had to buy frozen mice, thaw them, and then puppet them around to make them seem alive. Feeding that thing was a whole-day process; thankfully, it only ate once a month or something.
I wasn’t sure about owls. I know sport raptors eat raw meat - that’s common in videos of them - but I wasn’t sure about owls, especially wild ones not raised on already-dead prey.
I’m sure not if they have a preference for living stuff, but they’re definitely not above eating dead things. The dad will cache food for everyone during nesting so they don’t have to worry so much about feast/famine, especially with the young.
There’s also so great stuff out there about owls eating parts of animals way too big for them to have taken down themselves, so some will do some scavenging as well. Not having a sense of smell probably goes a long way to being able to eat dead things.
I need to learn more about it at some point, as I know owl digestive acid is nowhere near as strong as something like a vulture, so I’m not sure how they decide how old is too old as far as food goes, especially for the owlets.
I haven’t seen any of the raptors eat any prey items yet, they all seem pretty shy. One Screech ate after I went inside for a bit, but the hawks and owls seem too cautious about it. One volunteer I talked to at another park said she’d been feeding their Screech for like 8 years and had still never seen him actually eat.
Nothing to do with owls, but it does remind me about a sci-fi book I read recently about an alien species who had this big taboo about being seen eating, like humans have about pooping. It was based around the fact that, to eat, they had to open their carapace and eject their stomach around the food: an extremely vulnerable behavior that evolved into a social taboo long after it had ceased to be a survival concern.
It makes me wonder if eating is the same with raptors: unless it’s in small, bite sized chunks, eating requires such attention and concentration that it makes them more vulnerable - especially if they have to be on the ground when doing it.
I’m not sure they could take off while swallowing. I didn’t really see much info on it. They are surely more vulnerable on the ground, and their food is roughly 15-20% of their body weight, so being caught mid-swallow sounds like a very compromising situation for them. I saw some mention of sharp shinned hawks being able to swallow while flying, but given raptors’ esophagus opening is at the back of the tongue, I’m not sure how that would work out to get enough air to keep flying.
