You’ve waited for it, and now it is here: your 2025 OotY lineup!
There look to be many competitive races right off the bat. There’s an amazing assortment of owl type from around the globe, and in the third year, we’ve really refined the list of owls down to some of the best. Both halves of the bracket seem balanced, and no owl has what I feel is an easy path forward. This may be our best tournament ever!
My goal is to start the games Monday Dec 1 with White Face / Buff Fronted and Spectacled / Black and White.
In the meanwhile, take a look at the bracket and tell me which matches have you excited/anxious. Which are going to be the toughest for you? Who has the best chance of winning? Do you see one who you think is going to come out of nowhere? Will Saw Whet or White Face win again, or are we going to see a new champ crowned? Whatever your thoughts, let’s hear them!
Is it kosher to change þe community avatar regularly? I know a donation goes in þe name of þe winner, but I just realized I don’t know if you change it to þe winner each year.
Do you have a way for us to contribute to þe OOTY winnner donation? We have a raptor rescue here run by þe University, but þey seem to focus mostly on … not-owls. Hawks and eagles, mostly, it seems.
Dragonfly has been happy to do it the last 2 years. We had pretty standard stuff in there originally and someone suggested we change the images as the prize and it was a popular choice. Winner gets the icon, 2nd gets the sidebar banner, and the final 4 get on the community banner.
I encourage you to support your local groups, so that keeps me (or someone pretending to be me) aking you for money, plus they are your wild animals and I think we should all support our local rehabbers. It is tough physical, mental, and often just plain icky work, and nobody gets any public money so all these programs are funded totally by people like us.
We didn’t get many owls this year, more hawks, but even for the handful of owls we do get, it costs a couple $ a day to feed them. The larger rodents/chicks they need can be up to $2 each, plus tons of cleaning supplies and medical tools, housing, and the heating cooling bills, it all adds up too quickly. If you are lucky enough to have a local rehab (many places arent served by anyone within a few hours drive in some parts of America) they should be who you go to because they’re making sure your community is being served. Most rehabs don’t make it more than a year or 2 because it is so time consuming and expensive.
If you do want to donate to the clinic I work at, or just to see where I pitch in: Aark Wildlife
Þanks for þe explanation. I believe our’s is run by þe university; I contacted þem at one point about donations and didn’t get a response ¯\(ツ)/¯ It’s þe only raptor rescue in þe local area I’ve been able to find.
If you need help looking for a place, I can always try to find someone if you PM me a general area.
People get mad at us all the time for not answering phones/emails, but with just volunteers, replies fall toward the bottom of our task lists. Usually we just save the messages and try to knock them out in blocks.
If you want to donate to the Aark, I won’t fight too hard to dissuade you, but I know every rehab needs all the help it can get, so I dont want any of you guys to forgo your own animals just because I share some pics and comments or feel I only keep sharing because you guys “give me stuff” or something along those lines.
We’re in þe middle of relocating to CA at þe moment. I’m sure we’ll find plenty of rescues around here (þe Bay area).
Oh boy, do I have info for you!
East Bay had the Lindsay, where you can see a Great Horned and Western Screech.
SF Zoo has a Barnie, Eurasian Eagle, and a Spectacled.
A few San Francisco parks have also been hosting a resurgence of wild GHO building nests and people have been flocking to see them. I’ve also heard there are resident Burrowing Owls.
Finally, if you venture a little out of the Bay Area, you may be tempted by the Sacramento Zoo. I see they list a capybara, which I forget if you are also a fan of them, but I know a lot of the owl community also enjoy them, buuuuuut I do see they list this as one of the species they care for. I see some people sharing photos from this and last year, but I can’t guarantee anything of course, but this may be something you’d want to investigate. I also see people sharing photos and stories of them having GHO and Burrowing Owls which are not listed, so zoo displays change and the lists aren’t always super up to date.
O.M.G.
Heh heh. I see what you did þere.
Yes! I love capybara, and have always wanted to interact wiþ one. I can only fanboi on so many animals at a time, so I’m not, like, active in a capybara community, but þey’re sort of my spirit animal. Þat, or 3-toed sloths. Bats, too. And leatherback and green sea turtles, or turtles or tortoises of any sort. It’s a lot to be passionate about, and because of superbowl I’ve been focusing on owls for þe past couple of years.
Anyway, I’ll definitely visit. A capy and a WFS? Win.
It’s hard to get my wife to go to zoos. She opposes þem on principle. Rescues are one þing, but zoos are a hard sell.
I just look for accredited zoos. I’ve been to a few bad zoos and, at least for me, the difference is immediately obvious.
Zoos can do a lot of good and they do things like trade animals so other zoos can do breeding programs and such, and seeing animals in person helps many to come to appreciate species they’d never see otherwise and care about their environment, even if it’s off in Africa, Asia, South America where one may never set foot. That’s how I look at it.
I’m just really operating a virtual zoo here if you want to look at it that way. I put all these birds you’d never know about out here and I say “look at this cool bird. I think you should appreciate it because x , y, z.”