How to find the snowy owl near you

Snowy owl stands on Wisconsin brush,

The white, Harry Potter owls are having a boom year, sighted in Boston, Chicago, Philly, Denver and Long Island. Look on eBird to see where.

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25 lions rescued from Bolivian circuses in flight CO sanctuary

25 recovering circus lions are in flight right now from Bolivia to Denver. They’ll get to live in the most natural setting they’ve ever seen at The Wild Animal Sanctuary.

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Wolf seminars in Midwest; crazy wolf hunting bills out west; good news for big cats

leopard with crazy big spots

A Republican congressman introduced a bill to allow MT and ID to manage their wolves (that is, hunt them to extinction). Meanwhile, WI and MI have wolf classes

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Hunter shoots Assateague wild horse; Yellowstone wolf poisoned by banned compound

Wild Horse Grazing

Hunters shot and killed a 28-year old mare on MD’s Assateague National Sea Shore. 1080 poison was what killed a Yellowstone wolf that wandered to CO.

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Abert’s Squirrel: Cartoonish and Likes Western Mountains

Across the southwest is a cartoonish squirrel that wears a gray tuxedo and tassles on his ears. You can call them either Abert or Abert’s Squirrel.

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Seeing Magpies, Beaver and a Singing Eagle in Aspen

magpies

I’m in Aspen while my husband moderates a panel on the Rooftop Comedy Festival so I went to check out the Aspen Center for Environmental Studies. I thought I had arrived just in time to go on one of  their summer beaver lodge walks. But I’m just a bit early. They do them all summer, two nights a week. The center is closed after 5 otherwise, so you can’t do the walk on your own. I’m curious whether a beaver lodge in front of the Aspen Art Museum is still active.

The lodge itself is on the bank and not very obvious, one of the workers, Olivia told us. They’ve put fencing and chicken wire around trees all over their property to protect them from the beavers. And they still have to undo complicated and well-constructed beaver-made waterworks, she says. But it’s amazing to have such an important species right there–the center is walkable from downtown Aspen.

The center itself has two non-releaseable birds,  a great-horned owl and a golden eagle, who sang for us.

Outside the center I was lucky enough to see a great horned owl, mobbed by sparrows, chase after them.  I saw a bat and a couple ground squirrels. Swifts are all around town.  Everything is bear-proof here. People talk about bears like they are a thing of the past–at least in town. Elk are seen out of town on route 82, but that’s considered more of a driving hazard than an animal

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Kenny the Facebook Goat Rescues Goat Orphan Across the Country

 A sweet sorta-rescue played out on Facebook this week: Kenny, a Florida goat spared from the butcher himself, reached out to save a Colorado goat in need. It all started as a joke, says Karen Matyjasik, who raises goats in Central Florida. But next Thursday a baby goat with nowhere to go will fly cross-country to start a new life, all thanks to Kenny’s Facebook fans.

Karen says Kenny, a boer goat, was her son’s FFA project last fall, but was so charismatic her friend Mary Ann got all attached. Mary Ann started a facebook page called Kenny the Social Climbing Goat, reasoning that celebrities don’t get slaughtered. When FFA ended, they tutored him in wagon-pulling so he’d have another job. He collected admirers, like Dillie the Deer. He would shamelessly ask for fans: “There is a STUFFED BEAR out there with 1012 friends . What am I Chopped Liver?”

Then another friend and goat herder wrote about trying to find homes for her aging father’s goats, in particular a baby with no mother. “This one showed up with no momma started sucking a little off this one, a little off this one,” but no mother goat claimed her, Karen says.

Mary Ann and Karen, in the voice of Kenny, started pining for the goat they called Orphan Annie. She got Kenny to pose for a picture in front of the computer by sprinkling it with his favorite treat, Lucky Charms. “As a joke we said she could come and live

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