
Learn About the Ever-Interesting Owl
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We live on a farm just North of Oskaloosa, KS. Several years ago there was an injured horned owl in our Rose of Sharon bushes it was at least 3’ tall, and beautiful. Our neighbor, an avid outdoorsman and animal lover caught the owl in a huge kennel and took it to a wildlife sanctuary. Unfortunately the owl had been injured and had broken it’s lower back. He was too far gone to save, very sad situation. We do see owl often around our barns and have seen other horned owls since then. We also have Bald Eagles that we frequently see.
My Dad had a pet barn owl when he was a kid. The owl was perfectly capable of hunting for itself, but loved raw hamburger which Dad often brought it as a treat. It lived in the barn, so there were never mice or rats in the corn crib by the barn. Dad would whistle and hold out a dish with the hamburger in it, and the owl would fly down, land on the edge and eat the meat. Later, he'd land on Dad's arm and take the meat out of his hand. After a few years, the owl disappeared, so Dad presumed he had died, and no other owl ever lived in the barn after that. here on Long Island we have owls, and now and then I hear them on summer nights.
I was hunting deer in east Texas. I perched on a climbing stand about 12 feet up in a pine tree about 30 minutes before sunrise. Very quiet woods that early. All of a sudden, an extremely loud HOO! HOO! blasted my ears! I turned to the sound and it was a great horned owl in a tree not 10 feet from me. Scared me silly! But I had to marvel at it’s ability to stay calm in my intrusion.
Sadly to say, where we moved to 40 years ago had the Great Horned Owl. It came almost every early morning to our front yard. I’d get up, sneak out and see it; I saw it fly over to the power lines where I could really see its image. Sadly now with all the housing going up, woods being cut, just more people, the owls are gone; so are our Whippoorwills, Quail and many creatures that helped make our decision to move here. It’s so disheartening. They call it “Progress”.
One of the things I regret most when it comes to wildlife encounters was not having a camera ready when I came across a very large Great Horned Owl that was stuck in my batting cage in the backyard. Frequently, smaller birds take shelter in the cage when hiding from predators, and this owl must have been hungry enough as it forced its way through a very narrow opening on top of the cage. Being shocked to find this beautiful animal and not knowing how to deal with this situation, I decided to wait and see if this owl would find its way back out, but she was not able. I used a pool skimmer to get the owl to get down to a level where I was able to grab it, and I took a large winter coat and grabbed ahold of what seemed like 20lbs of solid muscle. I took the owl out of the cage and let her lay on the grass. I was afraid she was hurt because she was sprawled out and not moving. I watched for a couple of minutes and then I decided to go grab a bowl and water, but as soon as I took a couple of steps and looked back to the owl, she was silently gliding across the top of the soybean field. It was a beautiful sight to behold.
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