It’s the end of the month, so this is the last update to begin with a “hat-in-hand” plea for donations. We’re currently at $1615, so another $385 would make our goal of $2000. I’m not overly optimistic we’ll manage that additional $385, but hey, $1615 ain’t bad and will definitely help see us through the rest of baby season and the end of the year...Again, many thanks to those who generously donated to help us care for these wildlings.

Now for the goings: we had eight—yep, EIGHT—releases this week! The robin, tanager, goldfinch, cowbird and all four Carolina wrens are now experiencing the sweet taste of freedom. They do, however, still bombard me, begging for handouts, every time I walk outside. And they get so excited at the handouts that they sling food everywhere…which means for the past several days, I’ve been more covered than usual with bird food…oh well…occupational hazard.

No further comments needed on these photos and the video:

Only had my phone with me for this vid; sorry...

The stubborn holdout? That would be the screech owl. If you’ll recall, the plan was to move him into the flight pen AFTER he started tearing into his own mice. He was going stir-crazy inside, though, so I moved him out anyway. Will he rip into those mice on his own?? Nooooo…But he has gotten really good at giving me the stink-eye when I go in to provide His Majesty with his ripped rodents. Sooner or later he’ll get the hang of it, and of course, I also need to see him kill his own prey before he can be released. It’s a work in progress...

Now, as for the comings…oh Lordy…LWR now has SIX chimney swifts. Swifts and I do not have a good history. Their stays at LWR have always ended badly in the past. They’re adorable little birds but they are VERY difficult to rehab. That’s why when this lot came in, a nest of five and an older singleton, I reached out to my Canadian colleagues at Swift Care Ontario to learn from their best practices. They’ve been extremely helpful, so while I’m still taking a “so far, so good” attitude, these little swifts are at least stable for the moment and have a much better chance thanks to the lovely folks at Swift Care Ontario. Fingers crossed…

When a vacationing Macon family found this great crested flycatcher at a public pool in Savannah, they assumed he was a young bird since he made no attempt to fly away. Luckily, they were headed home today and their path took them close to LWR. After I got the bird home, his general condition and demeanor raised questions: he was an older fledgling, rail-thin, and amazingly docile for a wild bird. So I called the finders back for further details. Seems the little fellow was sitting near the pool begging people for food. He flew into their child’s hair; tried to do the same to the mother, and put up no struggle when the father scooped him up to safety.

Hmmm…a wild bird who flies toward people and begs from them? My best guess? Someone raised this bird illegally, feeding it God-knows-what, and decided since it was fully feathered it was capable of fending for itself…and dumped it. Folks, THIS is why I get so worked up about people having the proper permits and training before working with ANY wildlife.

Great crested flycatchers, despite their fearsome-sounding name, are gentle little loves who must be taught to—as their name would suggest—catch flies and other insects on the wing. They’re not seedeaters; they’re not birds who can be shown a dish of mealworms and figure it out. A properly trained and permitted rehabber would know these things, and this little darling wouldn’t be sitting calmly in a cage at LWR, rail-thin, with barely the strength to perch…

What are his chances? I dunno. He’s severely emaciated but will readily take the food I offer and even call for it. Hopefully the rescuing family found him in time and we can pull him through. 

And then there’s this little guy…

I normally try to avoid rehabbing mammals during baby bird season, but someone dumped this little guy on my vets at Smalley’s Animal Hospital, so…yeah…we have a possum whose eyes just opened yesterday.

Possums are neat little critters: they’re North America’s only native marsupial, and they’ve changed very little over the past few million years. They’re also incredibly slow eaters as babies, and since I refuse to tube a healthy animal for my own convenience, this means we spend a minimum of 15 minutes per feeding on this one little guy. This is why I don’t work with possums a whole lot these days, despite my fondness for the clueless little rascals. Thankfully, it doesn’t take them long after their eyes open to begin at least limited self-feeding. I’m looking forward to his reaching that point…soon…

And yes, I did notice—after snapping the photo—that he appears to be sucking his thumb! Possums have opposable thumbs on their back feet!

Y’know, one of the first things you learn as a wildlife rehabber is clinical distance. You erect barriers to protect your emotional stability and your sanity. You love the wildlife in your care, you provide the best care in your power for that wildlife, you celebrate releases and you mourn euthanasias—but always with that clinical distance. “Poor baby, I hated having to put him down” and you go about your business, because other babies need your care and if you obsess over the ones you lose, you’ll go crazy.

But every now and then one little critter will slip past those barriers and win your heart. When he’s healthy and eventually releasable, it’s not a problem, because as much as you love him, he grows up to be exactly what nature intended: a beautiful, healthy young whatever-the-species.  And you’re delighted to see him take his rightful place in the wild.

When that baby that’s slipped past those barriers and won your heart is unhealthy, though, and you struggle to keep him alive, consult other rehabbers and your vets to make sure the care you’re providing is, in fact, the best possible…and then you have to make the heartbreaking call to euthanize, it will rip your heart into shreds and twist your guts inside out.

I had to make that call today on a sweet little baby who hadn’t just slipped past those barriers of clinical distance; he’d plowed through them like they weren’t even there.

I had to euthanize the heron chick.

He’d been going downhill pretty much from day one; I was just too caught up in his cuteness to accept that. The only day he actually ate on his own was the day he arrived, starving after going 24 hours with no food. From that point onward, I had to sit him in my lap and hand feed him. He stood on those stilt-like legs only two or three times during the first few days; then he settled down in the nest and refused to stand again. He began to spit food out, and still I hand fed, pausing longer and longer between pieces of fish to give him time to struggle to swallow. He nearly doubled his body weight in just 10 days because of the hand feeding…and Tuesday evening, he crashed. He couldn’t keep anything solid down. He shrieked when I touched him. He sprawled with his wings outspread as if something was broken.

I was up all night checking on him every couple of hours; Wednesday morning after I had all the other birds fed, I tried him on songbird formula, figuring we had nothing to lose at this point. He was able to keep it down but was still struggling  to swallow properly. I called waterfowl rehabber Grace Krick in Connecticut, who’d been my go-to when this little guy came in. We had discussed my proposed treatment plan and she agreed that it sounded like what she’d do. We’d talked again when he started having to be hand fed and she was worried about that but agreed that as long as he was eating, well, maybe he was just younger than we originally thought and would grow out of it.

This time, as Grace listened to my description of his crash and questioned me as to his pre-crash behavior and so forth, she sighed and told me that it sounded as if I’d been fighting a losing battle from the get-go. I knew she was right; we debated whether I should go ahead and euthanize or give him another day. I decided on another day.

Later that afternoon, I decided to take him to the vet, as well, for x-rays. Maybe his parents had fed him a fish with a lead sinker in its body or maybe he’d stumbled over the edge of his nest and managed to break a bone. I was grasping at straws, trying to find SOME fixable cause for his condition. Vet Peggy Hobby at Smalley’s Animal Hospital listened to the same details; watched portions of the videos that, looking at them in the cold, hard light of day, clearly showed his decline; watched his current behavior; and suggested that it was possibly neurological, which could be from lead poisoning. We did the x-rays. Nothing. No lead, all bones were perfect…Maybe parasites? Peggy agreed to run a fecal to be sure. No parasites.

Basically, we had a bird who was slowly losing musculoskeletal control and no reason we could find for it. Peggy said whatever it was , it was progressive and degenerative and admitted that he probably didn’t have long but said to try antibiotics, if I wanted, just because we had nothing to lose. She knew I wasn’t ready to euthanize just yet, so she didn’t even mention it. I started antibiotics and even extra calcium upon arriving home. (He’d been getting calcium and avian vitamins on his fish, per a rehab manual that had a section on herons, but hey—any port in a storm, right?)

Through all this he remained fairly alert but was so weak he couldn’t even hold his head up. By this afternoon, he was unable to right himself when he somehow flipped onto his back. It was time to call it.

I euthanized this sweet little heron who had won my heart, and then I slumped against the wall and bawled like I haven’t bawled over a rehab in years—gut-wrenching, loud sobs, followed by childlike snubbing—for about 15 minutes.

And then I wiped my face and mixed up more songbird formula, put out a mouse to thaw for the screech owl, and fed the baby possum, because even in the midst of death and grief, life goes on and other babies have to be fed.

That, my friends, is the harsh reality of a rehabber’s world.

The fundraising seems to be stalled at $869, so folks, please consider donating. Remember, the total shown on FundRazr doesn’t include donations outside that site. We have 8 days left to meet our goal, and we’re about to need more mealworms, rodents and fish, as well as ingredients for the songbird formula we use and fruits to further tempt the fledglings to self-feed…In other words, help feed these HUNGRY babies!

The tanager, goldfinch and robin are currently in the flight pen and should actually be good for release early this week.

They are joined by a fledgling cowbird who was found clinging to a twig in a dog water bowl. His finder dried him off and called LWR. I was worried the bird might have aspirated water in his attempts not to drown, so I suggested he bring him in for me to do a round of antibiotics, just to make sure he didn’t get pneumonia.

Cowbirds aren’t among my very favorite birds because they’re egg-dumpers: they don’t build nests; the female finds a nest with eggs in it and lays hers there, as well. So when the eggs hatch, the cowbird hatchling, with its voracious appetite, will generally end up getting all or most of the food, starving the other babies—or he’ll be so much larger physically that the smaller babies end up getting shoved out of the nest as he grows. Either way, they’re lazy birds in terms of raising their own (or, more accurately, NOT raising their own) and, as I said, not among my favorites.

They ARE, however, protected by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, as they are a native species.

Here you can see the four pen-mates together—a rarity in the flight pen after the first couple of hours!

The Carolina wrens are full fledglings now, although you’d hardly know it. Young Caros are clingy little birds who like to hide and huddle together, as if for warmth or safety…as you can see in the photos below. It’s actually cute and rather endearing until you’re trying to feed wrens whose beaks you can’t see because they’re huddled under their “hidey-hole” (or in this case, “hidey-log”). They’re headed for the flight pen as soon as the larger birds are released.

The screech owl continues to grow but stubbornly won’t rip open his own rodents; until he can do that, there’s no flight pen in his future. He’ll get there; remember, owls are NOT known for their intellectual prowess (and if intellect and aggression are inversely proportional, this little guy’s in big trouble)!

Aaannd…the bird you’ve all been waiting for: the heron chick! We’re pretty sure now he’s a yellow-crowned night heron (and watch us all be wrong—won’t be the first time!). Despite his frazzled “hairdo” and paranoid expression, he’s actually a pretty laid-back fellow now that the food’s regular.

In the video clips below, you can see how much calmer he is, even first thing in the morning before his breakfast. In the second clip, he’s full and drowsy but still interested in wiggling fingers!

Let’s start with the unpleasant reality: wildlife rehab is expensive and people are all too willing to bring birds to LWR but seldom as willing to donate toward their care. Between wildlife rehab and editing, my days are too full to engage in traditional fundraisers, where you have a supper or a sale or some other sort of concrete activity. That’s why I choose online fundraising—I can manage it in the breaks between feeding birds and editing!

And speaking of fundraising, it’s going well; in one week, we’ve raised $839, but donations have slowed. The running total on FundRazr shows less than this, because some donations have come in outside FundRazr.  Early on, out-of-state donations were a clear leader, but Georgia residents met the challenge, and at this point, out-of-state donations only narrowly top in-state ones, so c’mon, Georgia folks! 

One of the blue jays was released last week; because he was a fledgling when he came in, he didn’t spare a backward glance as he left the flight pen.  I called it on the other jay—the one with swollen joints. Whatever congenital issues he had going on, they impaired his ability to fly and were beginning to negatively affect his quality of life.

More unpleasant reality: we lost the titmouse. He had some neurological issues, bless his sweet little heart, but I thought we had worked through most of them and he might have a chance at release. He’d even begun attempting to eat sunflower hearts on his own. However, late yesterday, he began to crash, and nothing I did pulled him back from the brink this time.

However…the cat-attacked tanager with the coracoid fracture is doing great! Her wing still droops noticeably but it’s not hindering her attempts at flight. Thus far, she’s doing what every fledgling first does: short flits and gliding to the ground or a low perch.

When LWR received a call about a nest of four baby birds, I guessed it was one of two species: Carolina wrens or house finches. When they arrived, complete with nest, I wasn’t surprised to discover that they were, in fact, Caros.

I don’t know their back story; the young woman who brought them said she found the nest on the ground. They’ve grown like little feathered weeds in just a few days! 

You may wonder why we remove birds from nests when they come in with their original nest. Simple: the nests often contain mites and other nasty creepy-crawlies we’d just as soon not have in our houses or on the birds. Also, it’s much easier to keep birds clean in a rehab setting using tissue-lined “nests”.

The screech owl continues to grow…and glower…He’s getting quite good at menacing glares and occasionally does a really good stink-eye. Haven’t caught that with the camera yet, though.

I knew the second I heard this guy, before even opening the box, that we had a mocker on our hands.

The family that brought him was a bit disappointed, I think, that I wouldn’t allow them to see “all the other birds” I currently had. Folks, by the terms of my state and federal permits, I cannot allow the public access to the birds slated for release. Rehabbers don’t run petting zoos; we go to great lengths to keep the wildlife under our care WILD. Otherwise, its chances of release and survival in the wild are nonexistent—and that would defeat the very purpose of what we do.

Robins are cheerful birds, the largest member of the thrush family (which also includes bluebirds). Since I adore thrushes as a whole, I’m always delighted to have a member of that family to work with. This guy hasn’t disappointed: he’s sweet, he has a virtually insatiable appetite, and he gets along well with his pen-mates. He was found on the ground near his dead siblings after a storm.

Who are his pen-mates?

The cat-attacked tanager, who adores bathing. I mean, adores it. Last thing last night, she was in the water, splashing away. First thing this morning—before even eating—she was back in the water!

And this adorable guy rounds out the trio. It’s a bit early for goldfinches, but looky what we have—a goldfinch! His finder did everything by-the-book perfect. She saw him on the ground, placed him in a margarine tub and tacked it to a nearby tree, and waited for a while. No parents. Then she called LWR, left a brief, to-the-point message, and got him to me within an hour of her call.

And currently this unlikely trio share an inside pen. They’re pretty close to flight pen-ready, but at the moment I’m somewhat disinclined to use the flight. I walked up on a four-foot long timber (canebrake) rattler two days ago—less than two feet from him, in fact—and he was only a yard or so away from my flight pen, so…yeah…I’m a little paranoid about the birds or me being in that vicinity right now. (My nephew dispatched the snake with his pistol; while I’m a firm believer in the power of my long-handled pruning shears, there are times when discretion is definitely the better part of valor!)

So these three may stay inside just a wee bit longer than necessary…

And finally, this week’s piece de resistance: an impossibly adorable heron chick! Currently opinions are equally split as to specific species: either a green heron or a yellow-crested night heron. I’m leaning toward yellow-crested night heron.

And his tale is almost an entire update of itself!

His finder also did all the right things: placed the bird in a box near the tree he thought the nest was in and waited. When several hours passed and ants began to move in, he took further action, calling a group of volunteer transporters who are trying to network statewide. It took the finder keeping the bird overnight, but a volunteer did step forward to get the chick to LWR. He was a hungry and very vocal little rascal upon pickup.

I’d planned to combine a food run for him with his pickup, so I ran just a few miles up the road to a newly-opened fish market, sure that they’d have culls and scraps that I could get—or plenty of fish to choose from, at the very least. Wrong! There were almost no fish on display, and the person running the place spoke very little English and I couldn’t get him to understand what I needed, even after I took him to the car and showed him the bird I needed the fish for.

Meanwhile, I have songbirds at home who are about to miss a feeding, because this should’ve been a quick bird pickup and run for food…

So…off to the local Kroger, where I make a mad dash between leisurely shoppers as I beeline to the Meat & Fish counter. Great! They had what I needed, but not enough…I asked the lovely lady running the counter, Teneshia,  if she had more in stock and quickly explained what I needed it for.

“Oh, the poor baby! You hang on; I’ll get you some more right now!”  As she started back, I hesitantly asked if I could also get a pair of food-handling gloves so I could feed him ASAP.  “Of course! Here ya go!” She handed me several pair of gloves.

In less than 5 minutes she had more fish prepared for me to feed the heron chick.  Kroger has a gem in Teneshia!

Pay for the fish, race out to the car, which I’d left locked and running (just doing my part to contribute to global warming…), open the back door, glove up, rip into a package of fish and begin tearing off chunks to feed this now-screaming heron chick.

It dawned on me later what a sight that must’ve been: sun’s broiling; car’s running; AC’s blasting; I’m standing at the driver-side back door, head in the car, butt in the air, tearing off bite-size chunks of raw fish while hungry screams emanate from inside the car…

But hey, within minutes, hungry screams became contented peeps. (And yes, as I hauled butt home to feed the now-screaming songbirds, I took time to call Kroger and sing Teneshia’s praises to the manager!)

And that brings us back full-circle to the funding issue: this adorable little heron eats. A lot. He’ll be at the LWR bed and breakfast for several months, eating even more as he grows. He’s a prime example of why we do these fundraisers. If you’ve been holding off for a more concrete, specific reason to donate, here’s your reason: to help keep this guy fed and healthy until he’s old enough for release!

As many of you know, for the past several years LWR has initiated an online fundraiser around this time of year. Well, yep, we’re doing it again this year. Our funds have dwindled and what we have remaining is earmarked for the flight pens that last winter’s weather kept us from getting constructed.  We aim at getting started on them late this fall, but if we have to dip into those funds to provide food for the remainder of this year’s guests, it will seriously hinder the construction of the new flights.  Your donations now will allow us to have sufficient foodstuffs for the remainder of this year without having to deplete the flight pen fund, so please help if you’re able—and if you can’t donate, share the FundRazr link with your friends who might be able to help!

The blue jay we’ve been struggling with for the past couple of weeks continues to have issues. While he’s adapted to the displaced back toe, likely the result of a nest injury, he now has swelling in both elbows and cannot fly. I’m beginning to suspect his issues are congenital and that there’s nothing we can do. He’s a happy little goofball at the moment, though, and he’s also providing companionship for a fledgling blue jay who arrived last week.

This little guy, who has the chubbiest cheeks I’ve ever seen on a blue jay, was in imminent danger of being a dog-attack victim. He’s not thrilled with his new digs but will soon be in the flight pen, where we hope he’ll be much happier as he learns to fly and find his own food.

The barred owl with the bruised and swollen eye was released last week and was promptly dive-bombed by angry songbirds. All I could see was flashes of gray, but I think they were nuthatches. You can see the poor owl getting repeatedly strafed and whacked in the second video below; the first shows him soaring into the woods. The third is what I could hear as he moved deeper into the woods: angry songbirds everywhere he went!

LWR also received another young barnie. This one has an interesting and somewhat frustrating tale…A young man saw him hit by a truck; he called his local game warden and was told to put the owl in the woods and “let nature take its course.” The young man did so, and three days later the barnie was on his parents’ front porch on a wreath on the porch floor—very odd behavior for a barnie. At this point the mother called LWR and brought the barnie to me.

I initially thought he had a broken knee, as one knee felt slightly “off” compared to the other; however, x-rays showed no fractures. Oddly enough, however, this barnie never made a sound—and you know from last week’s videos of the barnie triplets just how loud these rascals usually are. He grabbed my thumb with his talons during his vet exam and barely drew blood. While vet Jim Hobby was palpating both the barnie’s legs, I let the owl gnaw on my hand—no blood drawn at all, just dimpled skin…

So…here’s my proposed scenario: the young man didn’t see the barnie HIT by a truck; he saw him THROWN from a truck. Some idiots had tried to raise a barnie and when the novelty wore off, they tossed the bird like he was trash. I’m still VERY unhappy with the game warden (NOT one of MY game wardens; this was out of their region) who callously told the boy to abandon the bird in the woods, but luckily, the barnie was, in fact, not injured and made his way back to the most familiar structure he saw—the original rescuer’s front porch. Truly wild barnies just don’t do that, people…

I’ve run this scenario by Steve Hicks of Bubba & Friends, who agrees that this is very likely what happened.  And folks wonder why rehabbers cuss like drunken sailors and dislike people…

A huge thank you to the young man and his mother who cared enough to seek help for the bird, who will be headed to Bubba & Friends early this week to join the barnies Steve already has.

The screech owl continues to grow, and his attitude continues to outpace his physical size. Last night when I was changing his paper, he threw a tantrum at being handled. Of course, it was too cute not to capture for posterity…

And now, saving the most fun for last, LWR had not one but THREE mystery birds come in last week!

This guy was brought in by his rescuer’s cat…and you know the standard lecture on that: cats belong INDOORS! The skin above his cloaca (butthole) was torn, giving new, very literal meaning to the phrase “ripping him a new one.” He also has a coracoid fracture, which isn’t something that can be splinted but normally it heals with no loss of flight skills. At the moment, his right wing still droops a bit but he is attempting to use it, which is a good sign.

When he came in, I initially thought he was a cowbird fledgling. But the beak didn’t look quite right, and he had a yellowish tinge to the edges of his feathers…and his voice didn’t sound cowbirdish…hmmm…So I did a little digging and I think he may be either a scarlet or summer tanager fledgling. I’m leaning toward scarlet tanager, but we’ll have to wait and see.

When a logger found these two nestlings after cutting down a tree, he took them to his girlfriend, who called me. She said he swore he didn’t see a nest, and I suspect it was because—if I’m right on species—these birds are cavity nesters. 

One of the hatchlings had a pretty nasty bruise near his preen gland (the gland at the base of a bird’s body, just above the tail, that produces oils during preening that waterproof the feathers), but aside from that, I could find no injuries, so I thought it would just be a matter of feeding them and waiting for them to feather out so I could ID their species. Unfortunately, the little guy with the big bruise died during the night. Apparently there was more to the injury than the eye could detect.

The other little guy, aside from being rather shy, is doing well and has feathered out nicely. HOWever…not all young birds look like their adult counterparts. So…again, after some digging, I believe this little sweetheart’s a tufted titmouse.

If anyone wants to take a guess as to the species of either of these two birds, feel free—I won’t swear my tentative IDs are correct. In fact, let’s tie this in with the fundraiser—the first 5 people who donate at least $25 and correctly identify one of these birds will receive a full-color 8x10 of that bird!

After the previous week’s debacle, I won’t complain too much about this past week being slower than is the norm for baby season. Actually, I suspect I’ve experienced the “mid-season lull”, when the first massive wave of nestlings has fledged and new nests are being built/eggs being laid to begin the second onslaught. April was a heavier than usual month, and although May seemed slow to me, it equaled April in intakes, so…who knows? It’s been a weird year from the get-go; why should it suddenly become normal now, right?

The blue jay’s joint and toe remain slightly swollen but he is starting to flex the toe a bit and put weight on the foot. The general consensus seems to be that this is some sort of nest injury that was aggravated when he started trying to put weight on it initially.

Meanwhile, he is—as most blue jays are—a shameless little beggar who thus far refuses to eat anything on his own. I’ve even hand-fed him bits of blueberry, usually a blue jay treat, which he eagerly snaps into his beak…and then carefully spits back out. This isn’t the usual food caching that blue jays will do, however, as he doesn’t bother to hide it—just spits it out and looks at me expectantly, waiting for the “good stuff.” He also likes to sling the “good stuff”, so his little face gets swabbed down every couple of feedings to prevent food build-up.

Below are a couple of neat shots of his gaping beak (pre-swabbing; he ain’t gonna gape after being fed and swabbed down). See the spiky cleft at the back of the roof of his mouth? That’s his choana, which is actually connected to his nares, or his nostrils, on the outside of his beak. When his beak is closed, the choana makes a seal with the glottis, the hole in his tongue, so that air goes directly from the nose to the lungs, rather than into the mouth and then the lungs like our breath does.  Neat, huh? 

The flyer is in pre-release caging now and I don’t see her often; she will occasionally stick her head out of the nest box in the late afternoon for a pecan treat, take it from me, and sink back down into the box.

The screech is self-feeding…sort of. He still can’t handle an entire mouse, even if it’s slit open, but he can eagerly chow down on bite-sized chunks of mouse.  As soon as he can eat an entire mouse without it having to be cut up or open for him, he’ll be moved to the flight pen—with his size, he’ll do fine in the songbird flight (with no songbirds in it, of course, folks—I mean, really!).

This Canada gosling was found on the sidewalk in a neighboring town, unable to walk properly. He had a large scabbed-over scrape on his left side, and x-rays revealed a fracture too close to the hip to be fixed. The x-ray machine wasn’t cooperating on providing a copy of the x-ray; all it would transfer to either flash drive or CD was a postage-stamp size thumbnail in which you couldn’t even see the individual bones, much less a fracture. And I didn’t think to snap a photo with the camera, as we had another bird to deal with. We had to euthanize the gosling.

That other bird was a juvenile barred owl that one of Smalley’s Animal Hospital’s clients brought in after they told her I was on the premises that morning. Her son had found him in the middle of the road late the previous night and placed him in a pet crate. The rescuer’s mother then sought care for him early the next morning. Upon arrival at the clinic, his left eye was swollen shut and there was blood on his face from his left ear. He was also very thin.

An exam by vet Jim Hobby revealed that the eye was just bruised and that the blood was from a cut to the ear, not actual bleeding from the ear, which would have signaled a more serious head injury.  These were his only injuries. Jim suggested anti-inflammatory eye drops for a couple of days.

By the next day, the swelling had gone down considerably. The greenish fluid you see is his eye drops; I had just medicated him when I snapped these photos.

By the third day, there was only a slight residual swelling! He’ll remain with me for a few days longer, though, to get some weight back on his skinny little body.

When the call came in that people moving pine straw from under a pole barn had found a nest of barn owls, I pleaded with them to leave the birds where they were and give the parents time to finish raising them. They had already destroyed the nest site by the time they called me, however, and so I ended up with three half-grown barnies.

For those who’re unfamiliar with barnies, they’re…umm…unique in the owl world for their vocalizations. They sound like a woman being murdered. One wit has said they sound like all the banshees in hell have been let loose. When these three cut loose as I was moving them from the dog crate they’d been brought to me in, it was loud but not too horrible; after all, we were outside, so there was somewhere for the sound to go.

Inside, however…oh, inside…How best to describe a barnie’s shriek in an enclosed space? It resonates through your entire body. You feel it down to the soles of your feet. Your brain rattles around in your skull, demanding that the ungodly din cease immediately. You feel the need to check your ears for bleeding from ruptured ear drums…It’s deafeningly, ear-piercingly, painfully loud, in other words.

And these three occasionally cut loose en masse. Oh. My. God. You have no idea…banshees from hell is a pretty apt description, come to think of it…

The video clips below feature only the warning hisses and mild shrieks warning of things to come if I didn’t go away. I was afraid the full-on shrieks would cause the camcorder to self-destruct…

The barnies, along with the red shouldered hawk—who finally decided to eat on his own; hallelujah!—are with Bubba & Friends Raptor Rehab now. Steve has a juvie red shoulder about the same age as my guy, and he has more experience dealing with barnies, who are highly prone to stress out. God help his ears…