One of the friends on the POTN forum brought up the subject of a live birds of prey exhibition, in a little town upstate New York. I found myself interested in this event – I never saw eagles or vultures up close.
I did have some doubts about the event - it wasn’t in subway range (this is New York, everything revolves around the subway system) and when you get a little bit farther away from the city, you need to have a car to get from point A to point B. Plus, some people said they went to the event last year and they weren’t too impressed.
Despite the doubts, I decided to rent a car and drive there. It wasn’t as bad a drive as I would’ve thought – the place was about one hour and change away, and the highways were quite empty on that morning. I knew Victor was interested, so we carpooled. We got there early and had time to even go into the local DD and have some more coffee and a snack (it’s really hard to wake up at 7 on a Sunday). further more, we were early enough to get into a parking lot, and not park on the road like many others.
The organizer of this event – Green Chimneys – is the nationally renowned, non-profit organization with a mission of restoring possibilities and creating futures for children with emotional, behavioral, social and learning challenges through educational, therapeutic and outreach services, while providing care for animals and nature, thereby promoting a philosophy of dignity and worth for all living things. (as stated on their website under “About Us“).
The two pictures below are details of a larger mosaic, created by the kids that were helped by Green Chimneys, as explained to me by a young guy, Marcel, who saw me taking the picture. Each square of the mosaic was hand made by a different kid.
They brought many predators – owls, eagles, vultures, in addition to the animals they usually have on site (not all of them are birds – they have pigs, cows, goats, sheep, mules, peacocks, an emu, etc.) They also have some birds in cages – they care for them because those birds would not make it in the wild, or would be dangerous to people. Unfortunately, although I took some pictures of some caged birds, due to the wire fencing (sometimes double fencing) the pictures did not come out as good as I would’ve liked, so they will not be posted. Also, you will notice that most birds were tethered – they are birds of prey, so it’s better to make sure they don’t attack people.
This one was wearing a hood – it became too agitated because of all the people.
This was a special kind of owl – an Eagle Owl. They are special because they are the largest kind of owls. And these pictures are quite high on my favorites from the event list.
In this picture, the said owl was all fluffed up because of a dog present. The owl keeper told us he (it was a he) doesn’t like dogs. See for yourself how much he didn’t like the dog…
I have more predator birds pictures in the Picasa/Flickr galleries (I’ll post the link at the end of this post). I want to post some pictures of other animals they had in their campus – me and Victor took the time to walk around, and we’ve seen almost every part of the campus.
So… they had a lama – funny animal..
Then they had this thing with too many horns (not really sure what kind of animal it is)
I wanted to take some better pictures of this peacock, but some kids scared him away, and i was only able to get one photo of his tail. Although there were some female peacocks in the areas, they did not have the big flashy tail.
I spent some time to convince this big bird to look straight at me…. but this picture makes me laugh every time is see it.
And they also had some “different” chickens – they look like young birds, but these are mature, and yellow is their color.
Ok, this is a long post…. hope you’re still here, and reading the text, not only looking at the pictures. To my surprise, I didn’t use more than one lens all day – i had the 10-22mm and 17-55mm, but the 70-200 2.8 IS II was glued to the camera. The only times it came off was when I installed or removed the 1.4x TC. I think I love this lens too much, and I should go back to using “shorter” lenses.
For more pictures, please visit my Picasa or Flickr galleries
