Finally got to make a return visit to the first owl rehab I visited. The Raptor Trust is a nice medical and rehab facility in northern NJ.
It’s a great facility to look around, but picture taking is absolutely terrible. They have very fine netting on all the enclosures. Most of my pics look like this, no matter how hard I tried.
I’ll share a few I got where you can actually see the birds. The post picture is of the most beautiful Barred Owl they had, Sonny.
So many cool birds! Sonny is very pretty. He looks so soft!
Can confirm about Red-tailed Hawks being massive. We get one in the yard occasionally, usually eating a squirrel. Which is cool and gross at the same time.
Sonny was so beautiful and sweet. He was even good for the trainer considering how gross it was outside. It really made me think about what the west coast is going to do with them and that made me sad. So many like him will be lost due to no fault of their own.
I had a juvenile RTH that tried raiding the birds at my feeder. I saw him succeed once. He corned some finch in a shrub and the finch bolted, but did not do it fast enough. It tried to go after the bluejays once, but they were not going to take that kind of behavior from him and they drove him off.