As you may know, at the Hawk Conservancy Trust this year we have introduced some new activity half days, including an owl experience for children.  I knew my daughter Milly would enjoy one of these as a birthday present and so we booked a day during the Easter holidays.  This is what she has to say about the day:

“When we arrived we met Ryan and his cousin Samantha, the other children on the owl experience morning.  Then we were greeted by James and Jane, our falconers for the morning.

We started off in the study centre with a quiz on the different sounds of owls, listening to them on a tape recorder and from a choice of four owls, on a quiz sheet we circled the owl we thought made that sound.

Then we had a chance to fly some of the smaller owls, such as Avon the Barn Owl, Chestnut the Tawny Owl and Achilles the Little Owl.  My favourite was Chestnut because he’s very beautiful.

The next bit after that was to dissect an owl pellet which had been found from wild Tawny Owls (we did not use the pellets from owls from the park because we would only find chick bones in them, but in the wild they eat voles).   We had a diagram of a vole skeleton and we had to see if we could find some bones from the pellet that would match up with the skeleton.  It smelt quite funny but I really enjoyed it!

After that we had juice and biscuits, which was good because we were all hungry and thirsty by then. 

Then we went round the park with part 2 of the quiz and looked at the owls in aviaries and answered questions about them, eg. how does an owl fly silently.  When we had finished all the answers we went back to the study centre and had our quizzes marked by James.  I got most of them right.

The last thing was to go out into Reg’s Wildflower Meadow and hold Tolkein the Milky Eagle Owl.  Tolkein is really cute but very large and noisy.

My favourite bit was dissecting the owl pellet.  Thank you to James and Jane for making the whole morning so fun.”

Owl experiences are for children between the ages of 8 and 15, accompanied by an adult, with a maximum of 6 children in a group.   For more details and to buy vouchers, go to the Trust’s front page and click on “Activities for young visitors”.

Click here for previous Leader articles