Check Out Some Hope for Wildlife Videos!Our fawns are hanging out in the barn getting some foraging practice. Deer love leaves. Leaves are a major source of their diet because they’re easy to chew, digest, and they provide water, sugars, and lots of the nutrients that help deer grow, maintain their body condition, and stay healthy. We have 17 fawns at the moment..quite the herd! If you want to help raise our fawns, we have animal sponsorships, which help with the care of an animal species at Hope for Wildlife for one year - and fawns are one of them! https://www.hopeforwildlife.net/gift-shop/p/animal-sponsorships ____________________________________________________________________ What do North American Porcupines think about? Well, as it turns out, probably a lot of things. Take food, for example. Just like us, food is an important part of their day and they likely spend a lot of time thinking about what they want to eat and how to get to it. Porcupines make feeding choices that balance energy gain with energy expenditure and risk. They don't just eat anything! They look for tree species with high nutritional value, often higher in sodium, protein, or digestible cellulose and ones they don't have to work too hard to get to or are too risky to try for. Once they find their favourite feeding spots, they usually den close to those areas so they don't have to expend too much energy to get to the fridge. ____________________________________________________________________ Owls don’t bob and tilt their heads just because it looks cool, it's part of how they perceive the world. They have giant, beautiful eyes and their eye placement makes a lot of their vision monocular. This means they don't have much ability to see depth. Their depth detection is limited to a bit over 20% of their field of view, right in front of them. It helps them to gauge distance to things to move their head all around and get a lot of perspectives on it. Monocular vision is really good for scanning and detecting motion, and although barred owls hunt primarily with their ears, their vision is still really helpful if they want to hunt or detect the movement of predators headed their way. In humans, this type of scanning vision is mostly limited to our peripheral vision, which is why we often jump quick at unexpected movements out of the corner of our eyes. ____________________________________________________________________ Red squirrels have some rapid chewing skills! Being rodents, they have sharp, ever-growing teeth, so they need to gnaw on things constantly to keep them filed down. And boy do they enjoy eating. Being fast-paced dynamos of the forest, red squirrels need a lot of energy. They eat about 5–10% of their body weight every single day. That may not sound like much, until you do the math! A typical red squirrel weighs around 200g, so they eat 10–20g of food daily. Now imagine if a 70 kg (154 lb) person at the same amount- they would be eating 3.5 to 7 kilograms of food a day! That’s up to 15 pounds of food a day… that’s like 30 cheeseburgers! ____________________________________________________________________ Young weasels use play as a means of practicing the skills they’ll need to run and hunt in the wild.. and they definitely need to run! Some animals carry the reserve fat needed for energy on their body, like groundhogs, bears, and people! But in order for these little ones to be able to run fast to pursue their prey, they need to stay light. So, they store next to no body fat at all. All of their their energy reserves are stored outside their bodies, through the practice of food caching. They keep their snacks all around the forest to keep up with the energy their fast metabolisms need. They need to eat 40% of their body weight every day. That's the same as a 150 lbs human eating 60 lbs of food per day! ___________________________________________________________________ Young merlins make loud, raspy begging calls that typically intensify as the parents approach the nest with food. They will continue making a racket until feeding is done! This vocal begging helps ensure they are noticed and fed, especially in broods with multiple chicks. The squeaky wheel gets the grease! The merlin is a small species of falcon, and like all falcons, they are aerodynamically designed for hunting speed. Even though they are roughly the size of a pigeon, the merlin's cruising speed is in excess of 70 kilometres per hour! ___________________________________________________________________ The pilated woodpecker is the largest species of woodpecker in North America, and the third largest in the world, measuring up to 19 inches in length! When you're a large woodpecker, you can peck at a tree with some pretty significant force. Woodpeckers can generate forces up to 1,200 to 1,400g. For comparison, a human concussion can happen from an impact at just 80–100g. So why aren't all pilated woodpeckers flying around with headaches? Well, their skull bones are both dense and yet slightly flexible, with an additional spongy layer of bone behind the beak and around inside the brain case. This all acts like shock absorbers, dissipating the force of any impact.
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