We decided to go up towards Spencer Butte park - the scene of our tough hill climb a couple of weeks ago. We had only walked a few paces from the car before we made our first discovery…an American red kestrel! He was quite small, but seemed also quite tame. I wasn’t going to risk getting my eyes pecked out though so kept my distance. We walked a little further and strangely enough a couple of bald eagles were sitting on a branch dozing. They looked pretty mean. Further along the track we couldn’t believe our luck as there were a bunch of owls (in the middle of the day!) long eared, snowy, barn…all different varieties.
Ok ok so maybe you had already guessed, we didn’t by chance stumble randomly upon a whole load of these birds. Last week whilst at the visitor information centre, I noticed a leaflet for a local Raptor Centre, and we had decided to give it a try. All the birds that we saw were all rescue birds, birds that had been injured by cars, wires or windows for example and were not able to fly or hunt properly so had been placed in this sanctuary. The centre relies on donations and where possible they release the birds back into the wild where they have recovered sufficiently to fend for themselves. Last year they helped over 250 such Raptors.
In addition to the above we also saw Gold Eagles, crows, and falcons but Chris’s favourite spot was….yep you guessed it… a tiny lizard we randomly saw on the path on the way to one of the enclosures. Unfortunately it looked a bit dopey, possibly not a very healthy lizard. It was a strange sort of brown colour, very unlike any of the lizards we saw in Oz.
The Raptor centre was pretty good. It was a bit strange that one of the meals we saw being given to some of the birds were small Quails. It seemed a bit bizarre to save one bird to feed it a different bird. I guess these quails were bred specially for eating at the sanctuary, but it did pose quite an interesting question!
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