Warm sunny days in late September in New England are rare enough that one must take advantage of them. So today Li Li and I hopped on the bike and rode to Bristol, RI for lunch. We had a very nice ride there with many bird sightings: egrets, herons, swans, gulls, cormorants, ducks and pigeons. Not too mention a lighthouse, boats and big waves.
Li Li enjoyed looking at the water and the boats in Bristol harbor.
32 miles roundtrip and a fun day was had by all. -t
Last Saturday we went to the Audubon society’s annual raptor weekend. Lots of raptors including: a Gyrfalcon; an Eagle Owl; a Bald Eagle; a Kite and a Baird owl and others. As you can see Li Li was able to get inches away from these awesome birds. Besides the live raptors they had lots of activities throughout the Audubon center. We went walking on their boardwalk down to the beach and got see to see many great examples of funnel web spiders along the walkway. We stopped to tap a web and watched the spider come scurrying out of the funnel to look for the latest victim.
Li Li was a little scared by the owls at first.
We also spent an hour dissecting an owl pellet. For those of you who don’t know. Owls don’t digest the bones, fur and feathers of the animals they eat.
Li Li conducting her first dissection. You can see the little rodent bones and fur on the plate.
So they collect them all and cough them up in a tightly packed chunk about the size of your thumb. We got to dissect one – It was Li Li’s first dissection and she really enjoyed teasing apart the pellet and picking out the bones.
This is a european eagle owl. It looks a lot like a horned owl.
Despite the rain it was a good day and we spent about 5 hours hanging out with the birds.
On a different topic. The blog back-end has been updated so the updates should be more frequent and may even include video. More on that later. -t