In the video, I fed a completely wild bird, which was taken from the street in the cold and brought into the room 10 minutes ago .
Typically during such procedures, the feet of such birds are fixed with tape, because they can fall on their backs and kick, trying to grab people's hands. In this case, I did not tape the bird's feet up, because throughout the feeding she did not attack me.
Common buzzards (Buteo buteo) are migratory birds. In winter, they migrate to less snowy and warmer areas, where it is easier for them to find food.
They feed on rodents, mainly mice. But if they could not find rodents, they will not refuse to bite a frog. In summer, they are very often seen sitting on the borders of fields on poles, wires, on haystacks and rolls of straw, or hovering over fields with monotonous drawn-out screams like "Mmyysysh! Mmmysysh!!!"
They are absolutely harmless bird for domestic cattle, which are very beneficial in agriculture, although they are often accused of carrying chickens and pigeons away - the sins of hawks. In fact, buzzards avoid farmsteads and do not steal poultry.
Buzzards can be distinguished from hawks by their brown eyes. Hawks have yellow or bright orange irises.
Not always and not all buzzards fly south. In warm winters with little snow, when there are plenty of mice, some birds remain wintering in their nesting areas. This year, three buzzards remained in the zone of our observations. Apparently, they believed GisMeteo (*a weather forecast website)'s words about "warm December and a mild winter."
Every day we see these birds on the outskirts of the forest near the fields. I cannot imagine what food they managed to find there. There is already a lot of snow, and buzzards do not know how to hunt rodents blindly, unlike owls.
Today, one of these birds, apparently, was completely despaired and decided to give up. Well, or to commit suicide in a particularly sophisticated way: she climbed into a trap for crows, where 8 of them were sitting at. I don’t know how the idea came to her mind, but apparently, the remnants of her brain were frozen yesterday in the temperature of -22°C.
The crows were so surprised that they did not beat the buzzard up. When I took this pathetic thing from the trap, she did not even resist.
This is a large and wholly intact female, not particularly emaciated, but hungry. She ate right away from my hands, tormented by the choice: whether to swoon on her back and grab my hands, or to eat. As a result, she chose something between the first and the third. It’s hard for her to refuse me when I insisted on stuffing her with food.
Now she’s warming up, but I don’t know what to do with her: we can let her out straight off, as she’s completely whole, but in the wild she will have nothing to eat again. We need to either let her stay until spring or send it to somewhere in the Crimea or Krasnodar, where there is less snow and more food.