>>it's time for gulliver's yearly manicure. a little filing of the beak. and a nail trim. >>gulliver is a great horned owl who lives at the avian reconditioning center in apopka and she's being made ready for her springtime motherhood
duties. it's also time to clean out her cage, or mew as it's called, and put down some fresh nesting material. then it's back in the mew. and the wait begins. a few weeks later, gulliver lays an egg. but it's infertile, like always.
gulliver, however, will still raise many young this season as a surrogate mother to orphaned baby owls. >>gulliver's raised hundreds of babies over the years. last year for instance, we had fifteen babies that she had her hand in raising.
so we generally get anywhere from fifteen to twenty babies a year and she's been doing this for over fifteen years. >>the avian reconditioning center is the only facility in central florida that surrogate raises great horned owls, with great horned owls.
so soon after gulliver laid her egg, the center received a call: a baby owl was blown out of a tree and slightly injured. her first owlet was on the way. >>so once we took a weight on the baby of course we did a quick little physical check.
we made sure that leg that they had discussed was extending and everything was working properly. all the feathers looked good and the baby looked pretty great except for being a little messed up. and then i always like to give them just a little bit of food
before i put them in with gulliver because it takes her a little time to adjust. that little baby just swallowed that mouse whole. so what we want to do then is quickly get it out to gulliver. we don't have any talking. as little human interaction as
we can during that time. >>if the owlet was put in the mew with gulliver still on her egg, she wouldn't pay attention to it. the infertile egg had to be removed. >>she wasn't very excited about us taking her egg but she
doesn't really understand what the next process is. so we take the egg, the baby gets put in there and then immediately she looks down and goes "oh! i've got a baby!" and starts that bonding process right away.
by this evening she'll be going over and feeding the baby. and this is a wonderful period of time that the baby bonds with the mother and of course this growth period is critical for that baby to grow up knowing it's a great horned owl and not imprinting on humans.
and eventually what we'll start to do is put some live prey in there and she will actually catch that in front of them. that teaches them that this is something it's okay, it's not scary. >>over the next six weeks, fourteen more babies are brought
to gulliver. it's a busy time in the mew for this owl "super-mom" she must raise her "flock of babies" until they reach eight weeks of age. >>and then after they get to be eight weeks old what we do is we move them into a larger flight
pen and they start to learn how to fly back and forth. and then the end result is we put them out in our big hundred foot flight and that's where it's kind of like what we call university. and we put all kinds of trees and branches and leaves and then
that's when we start putting out live prey so that they get an idea of what the real world's gonna be like before we release them. >>after about two weeks in the bigger flight mew, the owls are made ready for their release back into the wild.
>>tonight what we are going to do is as the sun is going down. we found a nice place to let them go. we're going to take them to a nice area out in lake county that we know is, um, pretty good habitat for great horned owls. off you go! off you go.
off you go! you have to go away. go on. off you go. [laughs] you guys are not doing what you're supposed to do. there goes one! i just think he needs a little more time. he just needs to go back to the university. you know how sometimes kids don't pass the
first time. so we'll just take him back because he should definitely have flown like the other one did. and then he should definitely not want to have someone approach him again. so we'll just take him back home and he'll have another couple
of weeks before he comes back out again. if great horned owls disappered we would have an awful lot of rats in florida. every owl makes a difference. every bird makes a difference and every one that we can get back out into the environment
that's gonna be raising and continuing on with their species is important to us.