Over the weekend we went to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology to their annual Migration Celebration and Steve took some fabulous pictures of a few of the birds we got to ooh and ahh over. I should tell you that we go to this EVERY year. We LOVE this event. (I even appear for a few seconds in their informational video about the celebration here. It was filmed in 2007/2008, I think. Scroll to the bottom of the page to find the video and you’ll see me at about the 2:30 mark.) (I’m FAMOUS!)
We always get to see lots of really cool birds. Like these.
That’s a turkey vulture. Can you see the hole through its beak? That’s the bird’s nose and it has a super sense of smell, much more sensitive than most other birds.
This is a little black-capped chickadee that they caught in special nets set up for banding birds. You can see the little band around its leg in the photo on the left. My kids all tried out tossing little stuffed animals into the nets to see how they work.
Then we went to check out the birds from the Cornell raptor program. That’s seriously the COOLEST part of the celebration.
A Merlin.
An American Kestrel.
An absolutely gorgeous Great Horned Owl. (Next photo too.)
And my favorite, by far, is this last one…the Eurasian Eagle Owl. Check out those eyes.
They are ORANGE. The first time we saw this bird, probably the first time we went to the celebration (maybe 5 years ago), we fell. in. love. I mean, how could we not? He has ORANGE eyes!
It’s native to Europe and related to the Great Horned Owl (which is native here) but is a much larger bird. Look at how big it is on the arm of this Cornell student.
You’d think it would weigh 30-40 pounds at that size, but it actually only weighs about 7 pounds. (LOTS of feathers.)
It was a seriously cool way to spend our Saturday.
Oh, and on Mother’s Day? I woke to kids, hugs, hand-drawn cards amidst the “Happy Mother’s Day!” greetings. And then my littlest came in and wished me “Happy Meyers Day!” My day was made right there. :-)
I hope you had a great weekend as well, and if you are a mother, I hope you felt very loved. Happy Monday!
P.S. Watching that video reminds me that I have a vlog to do for a fabulous book blogger, that I’m going to try to complete this week. And then I’m going to start vlogging here, too, once in a while. (You have been warned.)
Happy Monday to you, J! What a lovely outing – thank you so much for sharing it. I love owls, and that horned owl is just gorgeous.
~Cate
Hey, Cate! The owls were amazing. We also saw a little screech owl, too, just didn’t get a picture of it. So cute!
(Hope the blog tour is going great!)