A mixed bag—so what else is new?

Wildlife rehab can provide breathtaking highs, heartbreaking lows and nail-biting frustration, all in the same week—often all in the same day. This was one of the weeks where all three occurred throughout the week.

Leading with the good news (in direct violation of the media adage “if it bleeds it leads”), the barred owl with what should have been life-ending wing injuries was successfully released.  To be perfectly honest, I figured I’d end up chasing him along the ground to recapture him but wanted to give him the chance at release. To my delighted surprise, he flew fast, straight and smooth!

The attitudinal little snot somehow managed within the confines of his transport box to STILL find room to bow up in threat at me.

When I gloved up and got him out, he clicked and fluffed up, and then suddenly realized he was “free at last, free at last” and wasted no time getting out of Dodge, so to speak.

Branches were blocking a good view of his face once he landed, so I moved closer to get an unobstructed shot. He bowed up and prepared to launch himself again. In the photos below you can see him gathering for flight away from me; in the very short and mostly very blurry video, you can see him in flight and landing a goodly distance away. With at least a couple of decent shots and one good and one crappy video of him in flight, I opted to leave Mr. Attitude in peace!

The source of frustration is the screech. He was moved to a larger indoor enclosure this past week and initially did great. I happily watched him pounce on his food the first night he was in the larger pen. Then he stopped eating altogether.  It’s not unusual for raptors to go several days without food in the wild, and sometimes in captivity they’ll just get full and stop eating for a day or three, so I didn’t initially worry, but he’s still refusing to eat.  Force-feeding doesn’t work; he spits it back out. His weight is still good but it’s beginning to drop. He’s still alert; his mouth and throat are clear. He fought me when I tried to move him back to the smaller box, thinking that might be the issue.  Using white mice instead of black ones, with the idea that his impaired vision might make it difficult to see the darker ones, hasn’t helped.  Consults with other rehabbers have yielded nothing that I haven’t already tried…so…for the moment we’re doing fluids, which he will at least accept, to avoid dehydration—and hoping he starts eating, or at least keeping down what he’s force-fed…

And the heartbreaker was this adult male barred owl found in a couple’s back yard with his eyes swollen shut and blood all over his beak.  These folks did everything right. After they found him late at night, they confined him in a box in a dark, quiet room. The next morning they called LWR and explained that it would be that evening before they could get the owl to me since they had to work. That evening, they brought the owl.

My initial assessment was that the eyes might be ruptured and that the fluids crusting them shut were the aqueous or vitreous humour from inside the eyeball itself. I could barely pry the eyelids apart to check. In addition to the damage to the eyes and beak, the bird was rail-thin and his bedraggled tail feathers indicated he’d been down for some time before the couple found him.

The next day, vet Richie Hatcher at Smalley’s Animal Hospital had better luck prying the owl’s eyelids apart. Surprisingly, neither eye was visibly ruptured, although Richie did agree it appeared one of the humours was leaking out. He also said the left eye had a luxated lens (the owl was hit by something hard enough to rip the lens loose, so that it was floating unattached in the eyeball). During the night the poor fellow had bled all down his breast feathers—yeah, nearly 48 hours after he was found, he was still actively bleeding. Once Richie managed to get all the congealing blood off the owl’s beak, we could see that he was bleeding from one nostril. The inside of his beak was bruised and bleeding, and it appeared some of the humour from the eye might be draining through the sinus cavity into the mouth.

During all this, the owl was quiet and unresisting. That just ain’t normal for a barred owl. After discussing his chances of survival, Richie and I agreed they weren’t good and opted for euthanasia. Because he likely had a mate on eggs or maybe even young nestlings, this was a heartbreaking call, but given the fact that he’d already been down for quite a while, we figured if the female had already had to leave the eggs unattended long enough to hunt to feed herself, they’d already gotten too chilled to be viable; if she had nestlings, they also had probably gotten chilled and died. So this poor guy’s initial injuries probably condemned a nest of eggs/hatchlings to death, as well, even before we made the call to end his suffering—and he went down quickly and quietly, which barred owls NEVER do. That was a stark indication of just how horrific his condition was…

The goal of any rehabber is to return wildlife to the wild, as quickly as possible and safe for the wildlife. During nesting season for raptors this becomes an even more vital consideration—and when injuries preclude a return to the wild, the rehabber feels the weight of losing multiple lives, because we know the death of that one bird probably resulted in the deaths of all his/her offspring for the year. And yeah, that sucks, big-time. Welcome to our world…