Maybe others have the experience of raising cats and dogs, but I have a story of raising an owl, of course, it is not like the current Middle Eastern tyrants with a falcon on their shoulders to show their status. And I raise owls not only because I am young and ignorant and fun, but also because of the meaning......
At that time, we were still living in a rural area called Jiaoxi. Relying on my father's meager salary, my mother worked day and night, we had many brothers and sisters, plus my grandmother, a family of about ten people, although we had a difficult life, but we respected the old and loved the young, lived in harmony, and lived a happy life! One day, my younger brother came back from outside with a gray face, and told me mysteriously: There is a nest of owls on the hillside behind the elementary school, and asked me to go and retrieve it together. Without saying a word, I invited Lin Dwarf and Feigu, two friends next door, to bring a basket and a small pickaxe, and the four of them rushed to the mountain behind the school.
The mountain behind the school is not high, only more than two zhang, but it is very smooth, and it is an almost vertical earthen wall. This is naturally not a difficult thing for us wild children, we muttered, and decided to create a small soil nest from the bottom to the top, two steps apart, one left and one right, the powerful Feigu left and right to start work, a meal, two rows of fist-sized soil nests dug up. I couldn't wait to let my brother climb up, and my brother took the order, and climbed to the mouth of the bird cave like a monkey, and stretched out his hand to dig it, and Pu Lenglen flew a big bird out and fled with a chirp. It was a female owl, and we all blamed my brother for not catching the female eagle in time, otherwise there would have been a bird soup to eat today, and my brother retorted, thanks to the speed of dodging, otherwise his hand would have been scratched by the eagle's talons, and maybe he would have fallen from it. The younger brother continued to reach into the hole, and after a while he took out a fluffy bird, and we quickly handed the basket up, and one after another, the younger brother took out four eaglets out of the hole in one go. The eaglets had just grown their hair, but they had a few hard feathers on their wings and tail, and as soon as we moved, they opened their mouths in unison and pointed towards what we were going to eat. For the sake of fairness, four of the four eaglets, one for each of them, went home after dividing them.
When I returned home, my kind grandmother strongly urged us to send them back for release, and I ignored the things we had finally picked up, how to give them up so easily. I found a cardboard box, spread a rag on it, made a hole in the top of the box, stuffed my brother and I with two eaglets, and prepared a few handfuls of white rice and a small bowl of water. When I opened it the next day, the water and rice had not moved at all, one of them was dead, and the other was dying. My grandmother told me in a scolding tone that owls eat meat, not vegetarians. At that time, we didn't have much chance to eat meat ourselves, and there was meat for owls to eat. So my brother and I went out into the field to catch some frogs and grasshoppers. Sure enough, after the owl had eaten a full meal of meat, he became energetic, and not only stood upright, but also stared left and right with two glass-like eyes.
Then the owl grows day by day, and its plumage grows fuller. No longer willing to be imprisoned in cardboard boxes, escape, wander around the yard, and when they see us, they rush over and circle our feet, chattering and begging for food. As owls ate more and more, my brother and I spent our free time catching frogs, and after a long time, my brother got tired and quit. He said that it was only his who died, and that it was only mine, and that the owl's food had nothing to do with him in the future, and that he would never catch frogs again. Faced with my lazy brother, I had no choice but to accept it, and got up early every day to prepare rations for the owl.
Under my careful care, after half a year, the owl was plump, earthy yellow feathers, and its eyes were round and bright, as soon as I whistled, it flew over quickly, as if it were an adult eagle. We tried to let it go to the wild to find food on its own, but the owl reincarnated by the lazy ghost drove out, turned around and came back, waiting for me to find food for it from the wild every day.
A year later, I got tired of this guy who only ate and never worked, and I didn't want to catch food for him anymore. My brother had a ghostly suggestion: Kill this owl and stew it, and you don't have to grab food for it anymore, the best of both worlds! I can't bear it, after all, I have raised it for hundreds of days and nights, and I am still a little reluctant, and my grandmother is trying her best to stop it. We discussed releasing the animal, and on a dark night, I took the owl to the countryside near my house, and when I opened the door the next morning, it stood straight at the door, and tilted its head to look at me, and it chirped to me to eat, and it seemed that it had not eaten all night, and I had no choice but to catch some insects and feed it, and it was used to the life of this unearned parasite!
No way, the next day my brother and I packed the owl in cardboard boxes and sent it to the mountain behind the school, which is at least four or five miles away from my house, and the mountains are high and dense, and its parents are also there, returning to its hometown, I think it should live a very happy life! We opened the cardboard box, and the owl jumped into the grass, and made a few sharp chirps, not that it was reluctant to mourn with us, or that it was happy to sing freely!
If the owl has returned to its homeland, we have done a meritorious deed. A few days later, Lin Xiao's mother was chopping firewood in the mountain behind the school, saying that an owl had died, and the bird was intact, it should have starved to death, and it looked like the one I raised at home. My brother and I didn't give up, but we ran to see it, and sure enough, the one we raised, it was so thin that it was only a fluffy yellow hair, messy in the wind, it left us, and it had no ability to survive in the wild, maybe we harmed it.
We went back in a daze, and glanced at my brother faintly: If you are not diligent, you will end up with this owl!