New Roommate

Hey Everyone,
As you can see from my picture, I have a new roommate. She is also a great horned owl and about 4 or 5 days older than I am. She had fallen from her nest and was picked up by a farmer and his children. They though it would be fun to raise her as a pet. Unfortunately they were feeding her cat food which gave her a very upset tummy. It?s kind of like getting a new roommate whose last meal before moving in was a big pot of beans. Last night she had a terrible case of the squirts and the smell could be weaponized.

web pic 2 owls
Fortunately for me birds have little to no sense of smell. But she really messed up our nest box. When Mr. Tyner came down stairs for our early morning feeding you could see how bad the smell was from the look on his face and the tears in his eyes. He immediately removed us from the nest box, cleaned up the papers and the rags and hauled the stinky mess outside as quickly as possible.
This is one of the problems with people trying to raise baby wild animals. Most people don?t realize that we have a very specific diet provided by our parents. In order to raise us successfully we need that diet duplicated exactly.
My favorite food is mice. I eat the heads, the bones, the fur; the entire mouse. This helps to give me a balanced diet. When owls eat the right kind of foods, our poop has very little smell. We like being clean.
My new roommate and I are very expensive to feed. We will both eat approximately 10 mice a day at $1 each, so if you would like to help the Southwest Wildlife Foundation continue to provide yummy meals for both of us and all of our friends, donations can be made to www.gowildlife.org