Enrichment and Training at Carolina Raptor Center

Corvids are extremely intelligent and curious creatures. The ratios of their brains to their body weight are some of the largest found in birds and are only slightly lower than humans! Their intelligence is often represented in their memorization abilities, use of tools, and social behavior, but they have also been known to exhibit self-awareness. There have been many experiments with mirror self-recognition with corvids and this subject ended up being the influence for enrichment today. We gave one of our residents, Diaval, access to a mirror for the first time. Shown in the video, Diaval tries to give the "other raven" leaves and interact with it. Although, it doesn't seem that she is recognizing this raven as herself just yet, it is still a great depiction of just how fascinating these creatures are! Enjoy!

Continuing on with the Halloween theme this week, staff created monsters out of tissue boxes for our residents. The monsters have an opening containing shredded paper and paper tubes. Our king vulture and barn owl also had items like quail wings inside, while our corvids had fruit and superworms in theirs. - These boxes allow for our cavity eaters to simulate eating out of a carcass, elicit a natural shredding behavior, and also act as a foraging box for our birds to sift through.

With Halloween right around the corner, the staff have been providing our residents with themed enrichment items.  Today, Mattie, one of our great horned owls, had her enclosure decorated with thin toilet paper "web", a cardboard spider, and a bat made from a paper towel tube.  Mattie exhibits a shredding behavior, that many raptors display naturally.  The toilet paper was strung across a couple of her perches to encourage that behavior, while the spider and the bat provide a visual stimulus. We left Mattie with her items and checked on her a few minutes later.  When we came back, Mattie had already flown to one of her other perches and torn off all of the paper. 

One of our staff members, Adam, has been hard at work training one of our resident black vultures, Tombstone, to paint! Tombstone is typically cautious towards new objects so it has taken about two weeks for Adam to train her up to this point. To train our vultures to paint, we first target train them by teaching them to gently touch the tennis ball end of one of our target sticks. By doing this, they get a food reward. We then train them to follow along with the target stick and have them step through the pan containing the non-toxic water based paint and then target them onto a canvas. The result is an awesome foot/talon-print painting that we can sell in our gift shop to raise money for vulture conservation! The one pictured is still a work in progress - Tombstone will be adding a few more colors to her artwork before it goes on sale.

Today we gave Pishi, our King Vulture, a cardboard box stuffed with newspaper, bark of various textures, paper towel tubes, and dried grasses.  The purpose of the box was to mimic a carcass and to encourage her natural tearing/shredding behavior.  She LOVED jumping on it and creating new holes to pull out the newspaper through.  Enjoy the video of Pishi exploring her enrichment! (Sorry if the video quality is poor)

As a fun summer theme, we decided to create newspaper boats filled with goodies (oh and yes, that's a feather "sail" ;)), that could float in our resident bird's water dishes. Our corvids recieved boats filled with mealworms, superworms, and seeds, while our vultures had boats filled with quail wings and mealworms. We let these boats "set sail" in their enclosures, and provide visual, tactile, and dietary enrichment for our birds. *Diaval, our raven is pictured at the very top, while Pishi, the king vulture, is pictured receiving her enrichment in the bottom two pictures.

We wrapped up fruit using lettuce and twine (you can think of them as fruit burritos if you'd like) and placed them on various platforms in the bird’s enclosures. Dia LOVED these little burritos and ended up knocking them down to bust them open, and also attempted to carry them back up to her perch with her. The birds were all supervised during this enrichment activity, as we didn’t want them to get too curious about the twine.

I appologize that the video is not of better quality!

Happy Easter from the Carolina Raptor Center! The Resident Bird Care team has decided to get the enrichment blog back up and running… and what better day than today? To stay true to the holiday, we dyed hard boiled eggs with natural dyes (made from things like turmeric and beets), and placed them into the enclosures of the resident vultures and corvids. Eggs provide many forms of enrichment. Since vultures are very tactile, it provides them with a new texture and taste (especially since the dyes were made from items very new to them such as the beets). We also attempted to "hide" the eggs by showing the eggs to the birds and then placing them either underneath an object or in a new place that they could not easily get to without some sort of manipulation. This provided mental stimulation as well. Inca, our Lesser Yellow-Headed Vulture, spent about 10 minutes just rolling her egg out of a plant and around her enclosure before cracking it open and gobbling up the insides. - Enjoy the rest of your holiday!

These days Oshem is being trained to follow her handler outside of her enclosure to go on walks. Not only is this very enriching for her, but the extra exercise has helped with her arthritis as well! In the picture below she is enjoying sunning herself on one of the back trails.

Despite possibly being his favorite toy, he doesn't get it often and only for a day at a time. If an enrichment is left with a bird all the time, then it ceases to be enriching. Spacing out when a particular enrichment is given creates a fresh experience that is more exciting for the bird.

In this video is Pishimatakoa, or Pishi for short, enjoying her egg enrichment. Pishi is a King Vulture, a species found in South America. 

This past week some of the birds, like Zlaty in this video, were given used Christmas trees in their enclosures. The goal here was to change their enviroment with the introduction of the tree. Zlaty is a male Golden Eagle that was acquired in 1985 from the Liberty Wildlife Rehabilitation Foundation in Arizona. This is the time of year when eagles are nesting and Zlaty often enjoys having sticks to carry around and arrange. This makes the tree enrichment especially appropriate for him. As you can see in the video, he actively interracted with it, making this enrichment very successful. Even though he got a bit over zealous at the end, just know that no birds were harmed in the making of this video.

Enrichment activities are fun for both the birds and their keepers. We hope you enjoy seeing some of the things that CRC keepers do to make the environment a great place to be for the birds.