Yesterday I took the boys to a community cleanup event tied in with Earth Day and one of the exhibitors was a local raptor conservation group that brought live birds.

Two key takeaways:

1. The turkey vulture was ugly AF but had an insane wingspan. The falconers were also impressed by all the turkey vulture facts and terms the 7 year old knew. (Thanks, Wild Kratts!)

2. The Aplomado falcon was a cute lil thing that also looked like he could completely ruin your life:

(This is awkwardly zoomed in and cropped because we weren’t about to get too close to it.)

They also had taxidermied wings and talons from owls and other falcons. I pity all the poor mice, birds, and other creatures that did get their lives ruined by those natural razor blades.

The 7 year old completely lit up seeing these birds in person, as did I. We’ve seen owls up close before and red-tailed hawks from afar in our neighborhood, but there’s nothing like the live experience.

(Requisite reference to Will Forte’s The Falconer series of sketches on Saturday Night Live, which originally aired between 2002-2006—i.e. the exact years I was in high school and thus the perfect age to appreciate.)