DONE: NO. 6: Learn How To Handle Birds of Prey

Greetings from my birthday blog!  The 'eagle eyed' (geddit?) of any of you who are following my 50 challenges may have noticed that No 6: Learn How To Handle Birds Of Prey wasn't actually on my original list!   Just wanted to get that out there straight away.  There are two or three things which may be changed over the year for different reasons and I do have plenty of reserve options.  The item which was removed to make way for this one was 'the 50 day plank challenge' - I decided it was not that interesting, would be difficult to evidence and quite frankly my shoulder is not anywhere near being able to do 50 days of planks.   So when this opportunity came - well why not!

So, we went down the Gower in west Wales yesterday to visit Perriswood Farm Archery and Falconry centre.   The views of Oxwich Bay were pretty nice!

We took part in the Arrows, Talons and Tea experience.   Archery you/ll know I've already done, and the 'tea' part was basically tea and welsh cakes in between each activity. We started off with the Bird of Prey display.    The first bird we were introduced to was Robin, a harris hawk.  By the way, if I incorrectly name any of the birds, sorry, I've tried my best to remember.  We were given a lot of information about each of the birds displayed by Brian (I think) the Bird.  Really pleasant young man, obviously really into his birds and quite funny.

This wee birdie was very energetic and was flying all over the place.  All of the birds living at this centre have plenty of opportunity for free flying and all looked seriously happy and healthy.  This was the first of the birds he was asking for volunteers to hold.   Not saying I stomped over young children to be first in line (I didn't) but I was first up.  The following pictures are not good quality but you'll get the gist.

 

 I did have to have to a little bit of sinewy dead animal on the glove but it was fine.   This bird wasn't actually that heavy but had beautiful plumage.

After Robin, came Alice the tawny owl.   I LOVED her!  She was so cute and when I got to hold her it was too tempting to stroke her as she seemed so incredibly soft and fluffy.   Because of the soft and fluffy feathers we were told that when owls fly, they are silent - they really don't make any noise.  We were also told that rather than being 'wise', owls are apparently not the brightest creatures in the planet.  I didn't care, I got to hold Alice the Owl and she was lovely!

After the tawny owl came baby Jasper the snowy owl who is the equivalent of toddler age - still learning, exceedingly loud and very temperamental.  But exceedingly cute.

He was VERY loud and screechy but really interested in everything around him, demonstrated perfectly how far an owl can turn his head and was generally just extremely entertaining just by being himself.

 

We ended the display with a falcon.  I'd hoped we'd get the chance to hold her but apparently this falcon may well have murdered her husband without a regret and had taken to hunting Brian the Bird.  OK, maybe I don't want to go near this bird.   We basically now just got to watch the falcon freeflying and trying to catch the prey - to be honest, when he started twirling the prey round and round it actually reminded me of a scene in one my favourite films, Kes.  We don't have many pictures of the falcon because she was quite frankly too bloody fast!  She was so fast and flew so close to us that she even somehow managed to 'thwack' Stewart with her wings. I'll finish the blog now with a few of the photies we did get of the falcon.