"Arrrrr, matey, let ye be warned that thar be a gross photo at the end of this here post. Arrrrrrr! If ye want to scroll down and get a quick peak, see if ye can identify what exactly is in the gross photo. Arrrrrrr!

Meet Bud, the pirate eagle!

Bud is not a pirate, he is one of the education bald eagles at The Raptor Center. He lost his eye to a bad case of sibling rivalry. Some banders went to an eagle nest in Wisconsin to band the chicks and discovered that the larger nestlings had pecked out the smallest one's eye. Gross? Yes! Uncommon? Not really. Older eaglets will pick on younger ones and if the adults don't bring in enough food the youngest chicks usually get eaten. And you thought you didn't get along with your siblings!

Spent another wonderful, funderful day catching up on training at TRC. The California Condor is still in clinic, however it should be heading back to Arizona towards the end of this week. The wing injury is healed and the bird needs to spend time in a flight pen to work its muscles and then back to the wild. We do not have an outdoor mew to accommodate this size of bird and it's too cold outside for the condor now anyway. I'm glad that the injury healed. It will be nice to be able to talk again down in the clinic area. Right now volunteers and staff are pantomiming everything like a bunch of tacky Marcel Marceaus because talking is prohibited anywhere near the condor to keep it from acclimating to humans. I gotta tell ya, it's not easy to mime "I need 110 grams of rat, tail and intestines removed." Speaking of which, 110 grams of rat is the contents of the cup, the top half of a rat--tail and intestines removed. This particular cup of food was meant for a red-tailed hawk. Mmmmmm, yummy.