"I disapprove of rabbits that I cannot eat!" This is Leuc, one of the education bald eagles at The Raptor Center.

Amber and I did the first of our "Take Your Sweetheart to See Eagles Tour" today and couldn't have had better weather. I hope it keeps until our second one on Monday. We saw mostly adult bald eagles and only a few juveniles. We did get an unexpected bonus of six trumpeter swans and lots of common mergansers. We stopped at various places along the Mississippi but our best stop was Colville park where the trees were just loaded with them.

Tree chock full of bald eagles at Colville Park in Redwing, MN.

What surprised me was that this was a rather quiet laid back crowd. They were very excited about the eagles but not some of the pranksters that we normally have. I will say it was a generous crowd, we ended up signing up eleven people as member of TRC, that will help feed a lot of birds in clinic.

Incidentally, I ran into one of the flight crew at TRC today and she told me that this is the first month that great gray owls make up the largest percentage of our patients. As she was leaving the building she had hold of a great gray owl that had been recovering and was going to be test flown and execised to prepare it for release. It had a green spot on its bill. I asked what that was from and she said normally they put color bands on the legs of the raptors so they can tell them apart in the clinic flight rooms, but the great grays sit so low on their feet that you can't see the bands. In order to tell them apart, they put little dabs of color on their bills.