Of course, eagles! That would explain it!
... bleeding (go around chickens like that - I don't think so!) "A chicken scratched me" sounds so pathetic, but eagles' talons - now, that's an injury that gets a little respect.
I'd be impressed. I know a few people that do get eagle talon marks. The World Bird Sanctuary is here in St. Louis County on Bald Eagle Ridge Road.
http://www.worldbirdsanctuary.org/ Mostly for raptors.
It's just down the road from the Endangered Wolf Sanctuary.
http://www.endangeredwolfcenter.org/
They have really neat evening events and night howls. The property is large enough that the wolves can behave and hunt as they would in the wild. It helps for releasing them.
They have Mexican Gray, Red and Maned wolves as well as Swift foxes and African Painted dogs.
Red Wolves range once included all of the SE of this continent as far west as Missouri to Texas. When they decided that Red wolves were on the brink of extinction, they captured all that remained in the wild. By then they were all in Louisiana and Texas. That was 1980 when they were officially declared extinct in the wild. They brought them to the endangered wolf center here where they bred them and DNA tested them to determine which were pure and which were crosses with coyotes and dogs. Eventually they had a group they knew were pure. By 1986 they were able to release 8 into the wild in northeast North Carolina. A couple years later they released some in the Great Smoky Mountain park but with low prey density they left the park so wildlife service removed them and relocated them to the Alligator River Refuge in NC. Since then some have been released in Florida and Georgia. The wolf center has shared the wolves with other places like Wolf Park in Indiana and Parks at Chehaw in Georgia.
They're a beautiful animal and all that exist today trace their roots to St. Louis county.
It's the first place to breed Mexican Wolves too.
These 2 facilities are part of a huge green belt that extends along I-44 and the Meramec river through St. Louis and Franklin County and includes Lone Elk Park where there are herds of elk and bison.
@ChickenCanoe Silkie rabbits are clearly a rare beaked rabbit.
I watched The Butler again yesterday, at the beginning there's a quote by Martin Luther King that is pretty applicable to the riots.
"Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that."
The earthquakes remind me of something I read in the paper in the morning, apparently there's some volcanic activity going on in Iceland again, they're fearing a repeat of the volcano ash thing a few years back.
Didn't the Icelandic volcano cause some economic hardship when flights were grounded?
We were on Tortola in the BVI when the Montserrat volcano erupted. The day we were scheduled to return home all jet flights were cancelled. There were a handful of prop planes on the island but economics of supply and demand meant that the few flights out were way too expensive so we decided to sit tight. We had already checked out of the beach house we had rented and had no place to stay. A guy at the airport that was housesitting for a friend that was back in Sweden put my family and I up for the night. The next night we rented a boat and slept on it. Jet service was then deemed safe and we got out the next day but by then air traffic was a mess. We got as far as Puerto Rico and had to stay there two more nights.
The riots are reminding me of volcanos. Pressure builds for years and decades and like a smoldering powder keg it finally explodes. Nothing even remotely like this has ever happened here.
