Adirondack Wildlife Refuge - Part 3

I was nearing the end of my tour of the Adirondack Wildlife Refuge when I snapped a picture of this Barn Owl:

And this immature Bald Eagle. I later learned that this bird had been rescued on the Akwesasne Reservation after someone shot it in the wing and it was brought here for rehabilitation. Part of its wing is now missing so it will never be able to be released. I was told that the Mohawks often visit and sometimes chant to the animals, which seems to have a miraculous calming effect on some of them, especially this eagle:

A Red-Tailed Hawk:

I began walking back toward the path to my car:

And looked for animals which I might have missed or had been unable to get a good picture of:

That's when I saw this sad looking animal. Several tourists insisted it was a Coyote but I thought it had to be a Gray Fox. I found out later that I was right, and that the circling it was doing was a neurological problem and the reason he was here:

A Short-Eared Owl:

I began returning to my car on a different trail but then decided instead to take the shorter one on which I'd come:

But I got to see the back side of the student yurt along the way:

I was headed back to my car on my original trail through forest when I met an employee headed the other way and began asking him questions. He took me back to the pens I had just seen and told me the stories which I've used in these three blog posts:

He also told me about two Snowy Owls which I had missed when on my own. This was the female:

And this was the male - with his rat dinner. He cannot be put with the female because he killed the last one. One worker made it sound as if he did so intentionally but another worker said he just flies so erratically that he had accidentally killed the last female he was with:

I returned to my car on the same path on which I'd entered the refuge, passing the wolves again along my way. It had been a marvelous experience, and all the more so because of the friendly, helpful employee I'd met who went out of his way to give me a personal tour:

Adirondack Wildlife Refuge - Part 1

I decided to drive down to see the Adirondack Wildlife Refuge in Wilmington, New York at the foot of Whiteface Mountain. It was about a 65 mile drive along winding, scenic roads, and I parked beneath the pines and walked down a path to where people were looking into a big pen:

The pen housed three wolves - two gray colored:

  And one smaller, red female:

A young man and woman entered and interacted with the wolves, who behaved admirably with the humans but got pretty darn crabby with each other:

The small red female seemed to be at the bottom of the pecking order but she liked people and, I was later told, seemed to like dogs when the tourists brought them:

I walked from there down a longer trail through the forest (definitely not handicapped accessible), passing a yurt where college student volunteers live during the summer:

They had Ravens:

And Sylvia, the Bald Eagle who has lived here for years. They showed photos of the changes in her plumage color as she matured:

There was a red fox sleeping in his director's chair. He got up and came to the front of his enclosure later, interacting with the tourists, but I forgot to take another photo then:

A Turkey Vulture:

And Nikki, the fox. Nikki had a shedding problem of some kind, but then all of these animals have a problem of some kind which prevents them from being released into the wild once again. In Nikki's case, he was a melanistic (dark phase) Red Fox, probably from a fur breeding colony, who had been abused and used to train dogs to hunt foxes. He was rescued and now lives here:

I wandered among the cages, taking photos wherever I thought there was a chance of them coming out:

The sign on this cage said it contained Kestrels, but it did not. Instead it had three ducks. But there was a lot more to see and I'll post Part 2 tomorrow: