telophase | (no subject)

FYI - I'm at A-Kon this weekend. I tend to post short updates via text message to LJ, but they don't get crossposted here. So if you care, go there - telophase.livejournal.com.

Weirdest thing that happened yesterday - a woman walked by holding a box of sticks. There was something fuzzy in it, so I stood up to look more closely. It was a chick. Some sort of raptor chick. A large one - this wasn't a small little peregrine or something, it was more the size of a hawk or eagle chick. I don't know enough about it to ID it more closely. I said "How sweet!" and the woman said "You can touch it if you want," so I gently stroked its head - very soft. And then she went on before I could think of anything to ask.

I didn't dream it - although I dreamed *about* it last night - because Toby reports that people in the dealers' room were saying something about a bird someone had in Con Ops, so it has corroboration!

I am profoundly ambivalent about it - it was an amazing experience, but I want to know why it was at the con. I know that you have to feed them like every two hours, so if you're coming to the con, it's coming with you, but it's obviously getting habituated to humans, so I want to know why that's being allowed - this would probably mean there is something about this chick that means it can't be released into the wild. I'm ambivalent enough about the whole thing that I dreamed about it - interrogating the woman about it. :D Her answers satisfied me in the dream, and then it went to frustration as I wanted a photo and she had a list of rules - no flash, no strong light, etc. - that made it very hard to get an in-focus pic, and I was trying to set my camera's exposure, ISO and f-stop to get a good one, but was failing because the chick kept moving. XD

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Perhaps she's a bird trainer and is raising that one to be a part of her bird routine to work around crowds? I dunno. It's a possibility.

Maybe it was a hunting bird of the kind kept for falconry (and the keeper is involved with some kind of Ren Faire hawking at the con)? Or it might very well have been needs-to-feed situation. I got to pet wild baaaaaaby raccoons(!!!!!!!) this week because their wildlife rehabilitator brought them to a party so they could eat every four hours, and because they were too little for human contact to matter much.

Who knows, maybe she was a rehabber who found the baby at the con and didn't want to ditch to play mamabird yet. :D

Depending on how tiny it was and the shape it was in, it may already be not-rehabbable, too, and they may want to get it used to crowds for education, etc.

If the girl in question is a falconer, the baby is probably captive-bred and possibly of a non-native species, which would make it illegal to release in most areas. Falconers are highly trained, licensed according to strict standards, and basically orient their lives around taking care of their birds, and constant contact while they're babies is the best way to establish the bond that lets a falconer fly her birds and have them come back to her.

When I had to take care of a chick, it needed to be fed every couple hours. The one time I left it with my roommat, she decided to go to Atlantic city, and took the bird with her.....

ANYHOO, when I released it, after about a month of taking care of it, it didn't seem to want anything more to do with humans.