From Blackland Prairie Raptor Center
Pure bliss (or a desperate attempt to look like a tree). A tiny Eastern Screech Owl in our Rehab Clinic.
I’m sure it’s more the attempt to pretend it’s anywhere else, but it does give the appearance of extreme cuteness. It’s important to learn about animals and how they react to stress so we can be good friends to them and not be unwittingly terrorizing them the whole time.
The wild ones almost always act like we’re the most annoying things ever, but I guess that’s the price of their free medical care! 😉
You reminded me of something I wanted to look up.
Last week we got some baby bunnies that were attacked by a dog and I was trying to comfort one and the bunny lady said how I was doing it is how a predator would touch it before eating it. 😧
We see a lot of ourselves in our animal friends, but their lives are almost nothing like ours, and we can’t treat them like we’d treat fellow humans. Especially when we start to go to non-mammalian species, most of us just don’t have an understanding of their biology and psychology.
It makes great learning opportunities, but that just reinforces how little most of us know about the wild, too.