Bloody Mary Mix

One of the more interesting parts of my job as a professional naturalist is that I get to work with live raptors. These are what we call education birds. They are wild raptors iving in captivity and all have some reason they cannot be released back to the wild. Our Barred Owl is blind in one eye from a head injury. Our Red-tailed Hawk has a slightly misaligned jaw and our American Kestrel is an imprinted bird. We have a new fourth bird in training right now but you'll have to stop back as we're not revealing what it is yet.

With all these hungry raptors around we need a lot of raptor food. Unfortunately, you cannot pick it up at the grocery store. One of the main things we feed our raptors is pocket gopher. We are often able to get them for free from local trappers who remove them from farmer's fields. The animals would normally just be thrown away so we're happy to take them off their hands.

The reason I'm telling you all this is that it sometimes makes for interesting photos. For example, there are very few places of work where you need this sign on a garbage can.

The odd thing I've seen lately is that we've been storing gophers in the freezer in this Bloody Mary box. Once you've seen or had to eviscerate a gopher yourself, the box actually starts to make sense.
~Kirk