My co-worker Shouwen Zhang came back from lunch, and showed me a picture on his cell phone, and said, "There was this creature in the parking lot...it has the face of a monkey!"
I looked at his photo and said, "Barn Owl? I've never seen one...where is it?"
He and Chris Ravenscroft and I went out to see it, and it was still in the parking lot, just standing there sadly -- something wrong with its wing. It wasn't aggressive to us in any way other than to fluff up its feathers a bit to look larger.
But Chris's wife is training to be a vet, and had spent some time working or volunteering at a nearby wildlife rescue place only a few miles away. So Chris called them up and they said, "Oh, can you bring it over?"
Chris was a little taken aback, "I don't know...I don't think I know anything about handling wild owls!"
But they sent a woman over with big old thick gloves (think waders for arms), and an owl-sized butterfly net, and she had it boxed up neatly in a plastic cat-carrier in a jiffy. Apparently there is a place on a bird's neck (all birds!) where you can pinch them and they'll go to sleep for 15 seconds.
She said that luckily their vet was there today, and they would x-ray it and see if the damage was reparable or not.
So, on our Status Reports for work this week, we were able to include:
4. Helped to rescue a small owl.
While waiting for the pros to arrive, I looked up Barn Owl on Wikipedia, and showed Shouwen that one of its other names is "Monkey-Faced Owl" ("Ha! See? I told you!")
Addendum: The Motorcycle Connection:
I received this great response from friend John Blackburn on the subject:
There are many barn owls in Simi Valley. When a barn owl, apparently wounded, showed up in the road early one morning years ago, without thinking I rushed to pick it up before a car zoomed by. It was surprisingly calm—and surprisingly skinny beneath all those feathers. The animal rescue people let us know later that it was on the mend and doing fine.
Another encounter was less calm. I lived there in Simi Valley at the bottom of a long winding mountain road and sometimes when returning home, when it was late enough and the stars were bright, I'd slip my motorcycle into neutral as I reached the top of the road and turn off the engine to coast the last few miles or so in serene blackness. The road sloped steeply at some places and that night I had picked up reasonable speed, the tires whirring against the pavement, when whapppp!—something struck me in the chest with the apparent weight and size of an old Sunday newspaper, and it was stuck on me! wings beating against my face and shrieking while I too yelled and struggled with one arm to dislodge it and navigated the winding road with the other. When we finally separated from each other I had several scratches and a newfound respect for barn owns.
Barn owls!
Addendum: The Motorcycle Connection:
I received this great response from friend John Blackburn on the subject:
There are many barn owls in Simi Valley. When a barn owl, apparently wounded, showed up in the road early one morning years ago, without thinking I rushed to pick it up before a car zoomed by. It was surprisingly calm—and surprisingly skinny beneath all those feathers. The animal rescue people let us know later that it was on the mend and doing fine.
Another encounter was less calm. I lived there in Simi Valley at the bottom of a long winding mountain road and sometimes when returning home, when it was late enough and the stars were bright, I'd slip my motorcycle into neutral as I reached the top of the road and turn off the engine to coast the last few miles or so in serene blackness. The road sloped steeply at some places and that night I had picked up reasonable speed, the tires whirring against the pavement, when whapppp!—something struck me in the chest with the apparent weight and size of an old Sunday newspaper, and it was stuck on me! wings beating against my face and shrieking while I too yelled and struggled with one arm to dislodge it and navigated the winding road with the other. When we finally separated from each other I had several scratches and a newfound respect for barn owns.
Barn owls!
-Tom
