Snow

Well, its that time of year. We finally got snow...and a lot of it. So far about 5 inches has fallen and it may not be done. Snow does make animal care a little extra challenging and shoveling is not my favorite but at least it looks pretty out!

Now off to dig out my winter clothes from storage :(

TRC Blog

Check it out - A picture of me tethering a kestrel made The Raptor Center's blog!

skullage

Its time for another round of beetle products! I know some of you are not too interested but here are a few of my favorites from the past couple months. We now have bird heads galore and have started to try doing deer heads for European mounts. The trick with both of these is not to get the colored part of the beak or antlers into the hydrogen or the color gets removed.

I also had developed another life skill - I am awesome at skinning things. Tonight, I skinned a deer skull in about 20 minutes and almost entirely in a single piece.I am not sure if I should be proud or concerned to have this skill....

Deer

Merlin!!

members of the corvid family - blue jay, crow and raven

Skunk!

Windy City

This past weekend I took a quick road trip to Chicago with my friend Amanda. Its always fun for me to get out of the bubble and back into civilization.

One of the first things on my to-do list was a Starbucks run. Its holiday drink season so I got my first peppermint white mocha of the season. Usually, I get a regular coffee rather than a fancy drink but this is AMAZING. As a bonus, I still have a free drink coupon from my birthday so I saved $6!!

After coffee, we went to Millennium Park and took ridiculous pictures with the bean. If you are not familiar with this statue, it is a giant metal thing that was supposed to look like a cloud. I think it looks more like a kidney bean. Either way, its great to take funny photos with.

looking up at the bean

Then we hit up The Art Institute of Chicago where we saw the highlights, including American Gothic.

After some Chicago style pizza we went to Navy Pier and then did a little shopping before getting back on the train.

Chicago Skyline

sun going down in the windy city

looking awesome as always?

 On our way back to the cities we stopping in Milwaukee. We said a quick hi to my sister and grabbed some more coffee. I wish our trip could have been longer but it was fun and totally worth the hours in the car :)