New Red Squirrel satellite site

Today I loaned out a pair of our Red Squirrels to a new site. It is their first time with red squirrels and adds to our breeding group. Hopefully they will fair well there and breed next year, helping us with our breeding program.

Having bred over 40 healthy kittens this year we stocked up our walk-through enclosure, set up a couple of new trios for breeding here and then sourced out a few to our breeding groups.

By having breeding groups it means that hopefully our captive population won't have a crash. The idea is we loan the squirrels out to several places being able to call them back if we need to, and collecting any offspring they produce. We can then try and keep all the breeding group sites healthy with breeding red squirrels and help them all out if any of them or ourselves has a crash in numbers.

Sadly Mrs Milo passed away due to old age a few weeks ago. Also, as some of you know, Tyto one of our reared owls died unexpectedly too leaving his brother Alba on his own.

With a healthy breeding pair of barn owls on display in our aviaries we thought there was no need to be breeding more in our "Barn". And what with Milo getting on a little now too we thought we would just let him retire. We cut off his boots (anklets) and will no longer be used for display work, although can still be seen in his enclosure in "The Barn".

To give him a little company in his old age we paired up Alba with him to form a little bachelor pad.