Its been a busy spring at Blue Mountain Wildlifes Benton City  site. The raptor rehabilitation centers field office in Washington is the home for more than 120 young barn owls.

There, volunteer Michele Caron has turned her 25 acres into a place for orphaned raptors to spend their first few months of life.

This years 120 orphans is a record for Blue Mountain Wildlife. Of those, about 70 arrived since March 18, according to BMW director Lynn Tompkins blog. Theyve come from across southeast Washington including Dixie, Waitsburg, Mesa, Othello, Sunnyside and Yakima.

She jokingly refers to the Benton City site as barn owl boot camp.

In mid-April, she blogged that 50 owls completed basic training they could eat a whole mouse and move down to hack box training.

Hack boxes are large birdhouse-like boxes set atop poles around the property. Three have made it to flight training, taking off from the boxes.

Falconers use hack boxes to train raptors for hunting. But at the BMW Benton City site, they help owls learn from each other.

All those baby owls are hungry critters. They eat about 500 mice a day, costing about $175 per day.

To try to help feed all those hungry mouths, Tompkins and BMW held a barn owl boot camp fundraiser at Haward Amon Park in Richland, Wash., on April 23. The effort raised $3,100. It will help Blue Mountain Wildlife buy nearly 9,000 mice about enough to feed the owls for a month.

For more information, or to view Tompkins blog, visit www.bluemountainwildlife.org.