This was most of my setup for my live event today. These are life sized representations of all 8 of Pennsylvania's owls. The person that volunteered to paint them did such an amazing job!
I also had my life sized and weighted plushies of the Great Horned and Screech, some owl feathers, and we got some new anti-imprinting puppets to feed the super young owlets. I'll have to grab pics of those tomorrow.
Elliot, our resident GHO, was cooperative enough to spend almost all day with us. He was looking quite handsome in this beautiful weather.
I had a ton of guests, but not too many talkers. Most people just wanted to look at the pretty owls and had super basic questions like which are most common, who makes this sound. You guys ask much better questions. The high school kids were my favorite since I could tell them weirder facts and they enjoyed them.
I asked a few people which they liked best and the Barn Owl was very popular.
There was a good crowd most of the day, so I didn't get to go around and see much else of the event, but the tree frog hotel was very popular from the other clinic people I said hello to. They look something like this:
We have a similar one outside the clinic and we do get little grey tree frogs in it.
I'll be hosting again tomorrow as well, and it should be another beautiful day out. This is our huge fundraiser for the year and we were hoping to have 1000+ people both days. They didn't have a count for today when I left, but it certainly felt busy!
The paintings the young man did in my cutouts are so stunning! I was speechless every time I got progress pics and they are even better in person. They drew as much attention as the real owl. The feeding puppets and weighted plushies were the hit for the kids, but even they really liked the wood owls more than I anticipated.
You can't really read my fact sheets, but the head of our education program was really impressed with them and was surprised to see I had made them.