In February of 2020, the West Valley Outdoor Learning Center raised a bunch of money to replace the windows in our raptor sanctuary.
You know what happened next.
Spring and summer of 2020 were… affected… by the pandemic.
In 2021, the school district replaced the parking lot of the school next door (and the OLC), and it was really, really hot that summer, so working in the heat would not have been easy.
Not sure what the hold up was in 2022, but whatever happened, we couldn’t schedule the window replacement.
Doing this kind of work over winter isn’t feasible. It’s cold, there’s not a lot of daylight, and everything freezes.
So here we are in spring of 2023. The windows are being put in as I write this. I got here to move the birds at 6:45a. The workers from the district got here at about 7:45a, and, as I write this at 10:40a, they’re going strong… yay!
When that kind of construction happens on the building, we move all of the birds out and away from the structure. (Marcus, the Great Horned Owl, lives in an outdoor mew and is staying put.) When it’s warm enough, the birds hang out in the small meadow outside of the director’s office. Right now, because I’m here and I have work to do, they’re in one of the classrooms with me.
There are no kids here today, and the teachers are leading a field trip, so it’s just me and three hawks and two owls.
There are two classrooms, but the OLC’s 75-lb tortoise is roaming in the other one. It’s not fair to him to make him stay in his small enclosure (where he would kick up a fuss and make a lot of noise anyway), or to the birds (who can’t get away from him if he’s wandering, because they’re tethered), to try to make them occupy the same space for the day. (It’s warm enough that we could let the tortoise outside, but he likes to wander where the district folks are working with their power tools, so…)
The new windows (and framed bars that allow us to open them up to clean the windows) are amazing, and I’m glad this is finally happening.
Also today: hanging plastic strips inside Marcus’s mew so that he can’t get a wild hare and fly out when we open the door!
He hasn’t shown any interest in sharing space with any of us for any length of time, and that’s what would be required for him to get out of the mew. But now we have an actual physical barrier, and I think that makes all of us feel a little more comfortable with the situation.
Right after we finished putting it up, he settled back on his perch across from the door, so he apparently isn’t too bothered by the new accessory. Let’s just hope he doesn’t chew on the strips…
Carmen Yount 