in which I am 33 & 1/52(ish)
May. 23rd, 2023 10:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kaberettI turned 33 on Tuesday last week. Back in January, I had made and confirmed some Secret Plans and Clever Tricks that would benefit from taking place on a weekday, and so I cunningly asked Adam to book my birthday off work so we could Do Something for it, seeing as we hadn't managed anything for his birthday this year.
(I was then slightly discombobulated when it transpired that There Had Been A Miscommunication and he'd actually booked the whole week off, but after having a bit of a flap I cheerfully suggested we book his birthday present this year for sometime that same week -- Experiencing the Capybara at Shepreth -- and work out what else to do Later.)
You see, at the very end of 2019 -- or possibly the very beginning of 2020 -- a post about Loki the Raven was doing the rounds on tumblr, and it mentioned that he lived at a falconry in Lee Valley, i.e. just up the road from us. This was of Definite Interest to me because we had (I think relatively recently) introduced A to the concept that Owls Are A Lie, courtesy of some ambassador birds for the North Cornwall Screech Owl Sanctuary who had been hanging out at Cornwall Services on one of our trips down. We definitely still wanted to visit the Screech Owl Sanctuary (which has no screech owls, and is instead named after its founder) but it's really at the wrong end of Cornwall such that we have to be being Competent at Timings and Leaving The House to fit in a visit, so "owl encounter just up the road" seemed like a good substitute.
And thus it was that in early January 2020, as a 33rd birthday present, I bought a voucher for an Owl Encounter. Let's hold off on booking for now, we thought, partly because the falconry was closed for winter but also more pressingly because we were hoping for slightly better weather.
... so that worked out about as well as you're imagining.
The voucher was, in theory, valid for a year from date of purchase, but Given The Givens I thought I'd try my luck and e-mailed the lovely folk at Coda Falconry at the very tail end of 2022 to ask if there was any way I could redeem the expired voucher e.g. by paying the difference between the cost at the point of purchase and the cost now. In fact they refused to take any extra money off me, and having carefully but vaguely negotiated with A re whether Surprise Adventures were welcome I decided that booking the Experience for my birthday would be funny and therefore asked him to take the day off.
(Alas in the intervening time they'd moved a quarter of the way around the M25, but really in the grand scheme of things this is a fairly minor incovenience.)
All A knew last Tuesday morning was (1) when we needed to set off, (2) that we were headed to "Hobbledown Heath", and (3) that my Secret Plans and Clever Tricks probably had something to do with animals.
Please, therefore, imagine my utter delight when we arrived at the car park and the first thing we saw was...
... a decoy volcano, with bonus anatomically dubious dinosaurs, all presumably made out of fibreglass, which I had not at all expected and which did an excellent job of utterly baffling Adam!
Some minor faff ensued, including our hosts gamely playing along with my Determined Surprise and thereby briefly misdirecting A into thinking that maybe? I'd arranged? another Capybara Experience??? which wound up in fairly short order with us sitting on a bench at Coda Falconry and having it explained that we were here to Meet The Owls.
Happy thirty-third birthday, I said to Adam. ... Alex, he replied, it's your thirty-third birthday. I'm thirty-six.
*HAPPY THIRTY-THIRD BIRTHDAY. :D" I said, and watched Delightedly as Realisation Finally Dawned.
So that was extremely satisfactory and then! we got! to meet! some owls!!!
Up first was Frost the tawny owl, basically so that they could get her to transfer from their glove to ours and check that we didn't panic when Actually Touching A Wol. It was also explained to us that contra information I had previously been given, both sexes can make both the too-wit and the too-woo sounds -- but pairs tend to make one each as a method of range-finding or echo-locating each other! We also got our first opportunity to STROKE AN OWL; Frosty was very happy to get back-of-neck scritches, which was Lovely.
Next: Squeak, a burrowing owl whose volume appeared to be set permanently to YELL. In theory, we were going to practise having Squeak fly very short distances from one glove to another so that we could get used to having an owl flying directly at us and indeed landing on us, without panicking, with a very small owl. In fact we managed two or three flights before Squeak decided that he'd been got out of his aviary and therefore it was Display Time, and disappeared out of the yard to the arena, where he very happily flew from perch to perch, shouting all the while. We had minor delighted hysterics! This was GREAT.
Third: Logan the Eurasian Eagle Owl, bigger again, who was actually supposed to be coming out to the arena with us... and who indicated his displeasure at how much we were standing around and talking instead of Letting Him Do His Job And Have His Treats by... going and sitting in a tree and staring at us pointedly. This too was deeply amusing.
Fourth was Freya, a snowy owl we got to do a few very short flights with inside her aviary -- it was too warm to take her out into the sunshine. She is beautiful, will shortly be moving house, and prompted the explanation that female snowy owls tend to have much more barring and speckling than males.
FIFTH AND FINAL Dizzy the barn owl, who got put in a transport box and carried down to the short section of woodland walk to do some more free flying among the trees. We were warned that she sometimes decides she wants to land on people's heads, and then she actually did and it was brilliant. She decided! that she was bored of flying to the glove! and repeatedly put herself on both my shoulder and my head, usually coming up from behind me so the first thing I knew was suddenly there was a Very Warm ball of Very Light and Slightly Pointy fluff on my shoulder, because barn owls of course fly nearly silently. I was delighted, and I might at some point upload some of the photos A took of the entire Situation.
We then wandered around the venue for a bit and eventually wound up back at the arena for the afternoon flying display (having watched some of a Capybara Experience occur): we also got to see Misty and Poppy being flown, before finally pushing off home.
Absolutely fantastic Experiencing of Owls, highly recommend, Coda are lovely, kind of want to go back and do it all all over again.
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Date: 2023-05-23 11:15 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2023-05-24 01:27 am (UTC)(my raptor content lately has been a friend posting updates on the red-tailed hawk nest on the ledge outside their office windows. The babies are just starting to hit the awkward adolescent stage of adult feathers coming in under all the down)
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Date: 2023-05-24 03:19 am (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2023-05-24 09:36 am (UTC)I can recommend some walk-through aviaries containing mischievous hat-shredding parrots, if you're ever likely to be down this way...
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Date: 2023-05-24 09:48 am (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2023-05-24 11:45 am (UTC)Aww, lovely!
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Date: 2023-05-24 12:13 pm (UTC)(ok, Squeak's is also a bit odd, but in an understandable way by comparison)
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Date: 2023-05-24 01:09 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2023-05-24 07:46 pm (UTC)WOL ON HEAD.
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Date: 2023-05-24 09:56 pm (UTC)A Continuation of Wol by Other Means
Date: 2023-05-25 07:14 am (UTC)There is a pub in Darkest Somerset, whose publican keeps owls as pets in an aviary and sometimes free-flies them.
If you know him well (and a number of Aikido people do, because we drink there quite a bit) he will show you...
They range from the cute to the beautiful to the Fearsome.
...If you ever stay in the village of Blackford, be warned: they make alarming noises in the night.
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Date: 2023-05-26 12:56 am (UTC)