International Migratory Bird Day

On the spur of the moment we headed to West Yellowstone for International Migratory Bird Day.  The Yellowstone Grizzly and Wolf Discovery Center and Yellowstone National Park were doing a joint program on Raptors, Ravens and the birds of Yellowstone.  They had a bird walk early in the day so we missed that.

This is a western screech owl, it was so cute I wanted to take it home.  It had been hit by a car and lost sight in one eye.  It can't live in the wild so its an Owl ambassador now.
















Here is the naturalist AJ with a roughed  leg hawk.

















He was such a beautiful bird,  He had a broken wing so he too can not live in the wild.  Some of his feathers don't grow right because of it.











Then we saw a Great Horned Owl.














AJ and Great Horned owl.  Now the story of the Great Horned Owl is interesting.  He has imprinted on humans.  He was calling to us all through the presentation.

We also saw a presentation on Ravens, my favorite bird. It covered all the Raven lore from different cultures, about all the science and the relationships that Ravens have with wolves and Grizzly Bears.  It was a wonderful presentation.  They have no live birds though.  We had to go outside for them.










When we walked outside I saw these four ravens sitting on the top of the sign.  I snapped a quick picture. After a nice lunch in town we headed into the park and saw these.












We saw these Elk cows standing in the river.  This was so unusual that I took a picture of them,  You usually see Elk on the shore.  We know that Elk sometimes go stand in a river when there are wolves around but we did not see any of them.  It was a great day trip but I wish we could have stayed longer.

















I felt like sketching so this is what I did.  I had a wonderful Mothers Day.  I hope you did too!