Thursday, April 1, 2010

Me and Molly and McGee


I've been lost in a new addiction called MOD.
Molly Obsessive Disorder.
Molly and her mate McGee (pictured above) are two barn owls in San Marcos California.
They are stunningly gorgeous.
We love owls-take a look at my blog banner.
Three wise owls...need I say more.
Carlos, the man that owns the owl box set up a remote camera to watch all the
happenings of these two gorgeous birds.
Molly is waiting for her last egg to hatch.
She has 4 other babes named Max, Pattison, Austin and Wesley.



The kids have been quite enjoying this lesson for homeschool.
Tae made a picture of Molly and last week we studied the letter Oo-
Oo for Owl.
So cute.
At first we were all a little repulsed by the feeding but soon learned that the pellets that Molly vomits up are used as nesting material. The undigested fur and such is pulled apart and fluffed up for a very soft nest for her babies.
McGee is a great hunter and Molly's "pantry" is often filled with rats, bunnies, voles and mice.
The family especially seems to enjoy the bunnies.
Some things we learned about barn owls:

The babies eat meat from day one.

Molly does not regurgitate for them-she pulls off thin strips of meat and feeds them.

The babies will stay with Molly for about 58 days.
Mother owls can tell when an egg is not viable or will not hatch and will discard the "bad egg" sometimes by eating it.

Barn owls live an average of 18 months.

I hope you have MOD too.

Come view Molly and her brood here:

http://www.sportsmansparadiseonline.com/Live_Owl_Nest_Box_Cam.html

1 comment:

Melissa R said...

Bev, I have Molly and babes up every time I am at the computer. For over a week. I LOVE Molly. I just listened to her people person talk and one of the things he said is that there have been 7 million searches for Molly. Wow. She's so wonderful and we love seeing daddy swoop in every so often. I am so grateful to the person who posted this link on our group. I sent a donation to the wonderful people making this happen for all of us. It was just a small token of my joy.