A New Family Member

Wow!  It has been faaaaaaaar too long since I last visited this site and made a contribution!!  Reading past posts makes me feel sorry for all the happenings over the past few years that have not been recorded in this way. But....glad to be back and with especially exciting stories to tell!

Last week Kahlil was saying how much he wanted a falcon as a pet.  Saturday we arrived home to a young baby hawk in a box from a neighbor who found it on his land - obviously fallen from a nest but looking healthy otherwise.  The bird seems barely weeks old with a body full of downy feathers and only tiny pin feathers now starting to grow.  Together with some researchers living with us, we found a few lizards and a bunch if guppies and Mortimer (named by researcher Julian) was well fed.

Day 1 both kids were scared to feed the bird.  On Sunday morning they put a sock on their hand and were fighting over who could feed the baby and by evening the sock had been abandoned completely!  Mortimer is gentle and smart....he takes the raw meat carefully from our fingers and never picks at our hands or fingers when we are retrieving meat that has dropped close to him.  We were advised to put lots of cloth to keep him warm and feed him as varied a diet as possible.

An interesting dilemma immediately presented itself of course.  Mortimer is a carnivore.  He is a grey lined hawk which mainly eat lizards and snakes but will also eat small mammals, birds and insects.  We have a small bird nesting in a brick in our bathroom so we decided to take the baby chick to feed Mortimer.  Carl got the bird from the brick hole and the plan was to kill it.  But we saw it was infested with bot flies (google it) and Carl removed 12 from the tiny bird which of course meant we saved its life so we couldn't very well kill it now.  So back into the nest it was put and was happily fed by its mommy while we were sent to look for other prey.  Lizards are abundant around our house but not an easy catch by any means!  We were successful enough to fill Mortimer's craw and he went to sleep happy again.

Monday (day 3) was another adventure.  A large (over four feet) snake (locally called a dos cocorite) came into the bathroom to eat the same baby bird we had saved the day before.  After a few failed attempts, the snake was captured in Kahlil's net but now what.....Carl's not going to kill it, I don't want to either....are we really cut out for raising a carnivore?  Discussions ensued about killing of animals for food, the cycle of life, the fact that be hardly think about it much since any meat purchased in a store bears no resemblance to the cute creature it was when alive, etc, etc.  In the end, Kahlil said he would kill the snake and I said I would cut it up.  Big kill #1 completed (no pictures this time) and the happiest we have seen Mortimer yet!

Tomorrows topics.....all that poop!!