From Blackland Prairie Raptor Center

Pure bliss (or a desperate attempt to look like a tree). A tiny Eastern Screech Owl in our Rehab Clinic.

I’m sure it’s more the attempt to pretend it’s anywhere else, but it does give the appearance of extreme cuteness. It’s important to learn about animals and how they react to stress so we can be good friends to them and not be unwittingly terrorizing them the whole time.

The wild ones almost always act like we’re the most annoying things ever, but I guess that’s the price of their free medical care! 😉

  • gon [he]@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    9·
    8 days ago

    Yeah, it’s frankly a little unfortunate that their expressions of stress and discomfort can so easily be mistaken for bliss or playfulness… Still, I guess it’s OK to enjoy the cuteness, this time!!

    • anon6789@lemmy.worldOP
      8·
      8 days ago

      You reminded me of something I wanted to look up.

      Last week we got some baby bunnies that were attacked by a dog and I was trying to comfort one and the bunny lady said how I was doing it is how a predator would touch it before eating it. 😧

      We see a lot of ourselves in our animal friends, but their lives are almost nothing like ours, and we can’t treat them like we’d treat fellow humans. Especially when we start to go to non-mammalian species, most of us just don’t have an understanding of their biology and psychology.

      It makes great learning opportunities, but that just reinforces how little most of us know about the wild, too.

    • anon6789@lemmy.worldOP
      4·
      8 days ago

      For the bunny info:

      Writeup on how people often handle wild bunnies in ways that can hurt them.

      Rabbit touch/no touch chart

      Rabbits do some head affection stuff, but they do have some blindspots, so watch going in too quickly or taking them by surprise from popping out of a place they can’t see. Most other spots are only grabbed by predators, and the butt is grabbed by both predators and other rabbits scolding them, so wild rabbit buns don’t seem to be a good touch under near any circumstance.

      I thought I was rubbing its forehead when I got it pointed out to me, but perhaps not or I was in one of the blindspots for a really little bunny. I forget if they even had their eyes open.

      I was more angrily scolded by someone at I believe the Shaver’s Creek rescue that has the new Hawk Owlet I posted about the other week. There was a funky looking turtle who I thought was playing with me through the tank, but it turns out it was actually very mad at me, and I was just further provoking it. Oops! Even though he started it, I guess it’s on me to be the adult in the room. So it’s easy to misread animal body language we aren’t familiar with.