Here at the Bird of Prey Centre it’s baby season. Our absolute favourite time of the year!
As you probably already know we have six breeding pairs of birds at the centre. Until now we’d only had one successful pair (although two pairs are new to us). That was until two weeks ago. Our Mottled Owls have successfully hatched their three babies and we couldn’t be more proud. They’re beautiful!
One of the three, the smallest one, is a new addition to the team. His name is Mushu, named after yet another Disney character (the cheeky Dragon in Milan), we’re all big fans in this department! Mushu is currently 10 days old and being hand reared by the team along with his other siblings. They come home with us at the moment (best part of the job) and are fed at certain intervals throughout the day. We’re hand rearing the babies so that they are introduced to everything from a young age, hopefully this helps them understand that potentially scary things aren’t actually that scary.
In other breeding news, we have four eggs in with our Burrowing Owls, and six eggs in with our Indian Scops Owls. Keep an eye on our Instagram page and the next blog for more baby announcements.
On the wildlife front, it’s been baby crazy too!
If you’ve visited recently then you may have seen lots of baby Mallards, Greylag Geese and Canada Geese too. We’ve been busy with lots of duck rescues, you’d be amazed at where some of these mallards nest, flower pots, hanging baskets, tubs, and all sorts. We’ve successfully rescued in the region of about 30 baby ducks and released them onto the water ways with their parents, safely.
It’s also a great month for the three ‘B’s, butterflies, blackcaps and bats. There’s lord of activity with all three of these. We’ve seen orange tip butterflies in our wildlife garden along with Red Admirals and even a few peacock butterflies too.
Blackcaps, a perfectly named bird, a quite abundant on site. We’ve also had these flitting around in the wildlife garden as well. Bats are now fully active by May, they’ll be feeding well and female will be seeking maternity roosts for have their babies. We’ve been out and about observing them doing what they do best, there’s been some great sightings over the last few days.
We can’t end the blog without giving a quick Atlas update. This raven is amazing. Need I say more! He’s currently almost 10 weeks old and in his big boy aviary learning to fly, fall and generally be a hooligan.
If you have any questions or would like to know more about what we do then contact the team on falconry@leeds-castle.co.uk, or pop up to the centre to see us!
