News From The Mews

I scrolled all the way back to my very first News From The Mews article and found it was very fitting to revisit with an update. Here's a look back at that first blog post from July 2016: "When I first met Carson, our resident red-tailed hawk, I was fascinated by her eyes.  The light grey iris was striking compared to the dark eyes of other hawks I have known.  This isn’t just a difference between individuals; eye color hints at the bird’s age.   Red-tailed hawks hatch with light-colored eyes that darken over time.  Carson is just three years old now, so we expect her eyes to turn a dark mahogany over the next few years.  Some other raptors change eye color, as well.  Eagle eyes change from brown to yellow, while sharp-shinned hawks start bright yellow and transition to a blood red.  We can’t know for sure why this happens, but it may be an important cue for birds looking for a mature mate." Now fast-forwarding to 2024, it is clear that Carson's eyes have matured into

I have always fed snakes on a schedule. One mouse every Saturday. Or two mice every other week. So when I found a webinar on behavior-based feeding, it was a totally new concept to me. For snakes, at least.  The basic idea is that you feed snakes when they're hungry, not on a predetermined schedule. Their behavior is key here. Are they moving around more than usual? Are they spending time in new areas?  Are they chasing after any sign of movement? These are all signs that they are hungry and looking for prey. It's time to eat! Digger pokes her head out of her habitat door. Is she hungry and searching for food? A behavior-based feeding routine requires very careful observation of the snakes and knowing what is normal behavior and what's not. To get a baseline of "normal" for our snakes, Emory and Digger, I started recording observations to create an activity budget.  Activity budgets are summaries of how an animal spends their time. So far, we've seen that Dig

The handsome Aldo, our American Kestrel, is always a show-stopper during raptor programs. But he really stops the show when he mutes. The moment gets a few chuckles from the audience, but I don't pass up this opportunity to make his amusing behavior educational. Some people might call it a poop, but birds do #1 and #2 at the same time, so it's called a "mute."  There are actually three components to bird waste. The dark spot is the fecal itself. A clear liquid surrounding it is urine. And the thicker white stuff is made up of urates, the material that birds, reptiles, and insects use to excrete excess nitrogen. Aldo's mutes don't catch me by surprise very often. I can always tell when a mute is coming by the way he backs up and lifts his tail. This early warning sign gives me a few seconds to move Aldo away from an inappropriate muting surface, like my foot or the office carpet.

Did you know you can train snakes? After finding some helpful videos on YouTube, I decided it's about time to try training with our snakes. The behavior we'll start with is a staple behavior for almost every animal I've worked with: targeting. The concept of targeting is simple: the animal simply has to touch an object, which is called the "target," and they get a treat. Carson the Red-tailed Hawk loves chasing after her target stick: I've even taught my pet rabbit to touch a mini-baseball bat and my  cat to touch my finger . So why not teach a snake to do it? I chose an object that would be clearly visible to our snakes. They don't have very fine vision and can only see blue and green, so I decided to try a blue lid made for cat food cans. The first step of our training plan is associating the target with food. They've never seen this blue lid before, so we want them to learn that the blue thing means tasty food is coming. When it was time to feed Em