Rescued owl babies back in nest with mother - My owl adventure

MY OWL ADVENTURE: Living in the intersection of human and animal habitats

Last updated: March 25th, 2019

A foundling


Rescued owl babies back in nest with mother - My owl adventureAs usual, coming home from work at 6:30 p.m. a few days ago, I parked in the sunken lot below our building and walked up the concrete steps to the walkway that leads to our unit. On the hillside a few feet beyond that sidewalk, I saw a couple of grey-white blobs that looked like they might be a new species of exotic mushroom. Such fungi often pop up here a few days after it’s rained.

As I got closer, I could see that what had looked like two blobs from afar was actually the head and body of a baby bird who was sprawled out on the soft pine-needled ground. The bird wasn’t moving, so I lifted it slightly, and felt it resist. It was alive!

My first thought was that it might be a goose, since our cul-de-sac is filled in early spring with geese—mating, honk-screaming and using our flat rooftops as runways for takeoff. But it looked more like some kind of raptor. I remembered a pair of hawks that had lived in one of these trees a few years ago. Maybe they were back.

Rescued baby owl in shoebox with pine needles and leaves - My owl adventure
The baby in the shoebox, just after being found

Then I noticed another little body, a few feet higher up on the hill, and climbed to where it lay. When I lifted this bird, there was no sign of life at all. Perhaps the long fall from a nest high in a tree had killed it on impact.

Back beside the first bird, I thought about what to do. There was little question of “what,” actually. It was more about “how.” Mentally, I saw myself clumsily trying to feed a baby bird who was barely alive. Success seemed unlikely. However, I felt I had to at least try.

I walked down to our unit a couple hundred feet away and emptied out a shoebox that I use to store paintbrushes. I put a few pieces of Kleenex in the bottom of the box and walked it back to the bird. There, adding some pine needles and leaves, I lifted the little one into it. It lay unmoving, but at least now I could get it inside and do some online research about what kind of care it needed.

The learning curve


Lindsay Wildlife Museum in Walnut Creek, California - My owl adventure
The Lindsay Wildlife Museum in Walnut Creek, California (U.S.)

I looked up the website of the Lindsay Wildlife Museum on the other side of our town, which has an adjoining animal Rehabilitation Hospital. Unfortunately, both the museum and the hospital had closed at 5 p.m. I couldn’t take the bird there until morning.

[su_pullquote align=”right”]It would be a good 14 hours until the animal hospital opened. Letting the bird starve seemed counter-intuitive. Would I leave a newborn human baby without food or water for that long?[/su_pullquote]

Continuing to peruse the website, I found a section about raptor care. There were recommendations. Place the bird in a box, as I had already done. Cover the box. The quiet, dark space, I read, would calm the bird. I immediately put the top on the shoebox and continued my research.

Don’t try to force-feed the bird food or water, the instructions went on. I pondered this. It would be a good 14 hours until the animal hospital opened. Letting the bird starve seemed counter-intuitive. Would I leave a newborn human baby without food or water for that long?

I checked another website, that of the Raptor Center at the University of California at Davis. They also suggested not feeding a rescued bird, adding that these birds need special kinds of food, and giving them the wrong kind might be worse than not feeding them at all.

I was confused. By now, the bird had been in the closed box for half an hour or more. I opened the box and was utterly surprised to find the formerly prone little thing sitting up like a tiny Easter chick and emitting a nonstop stream of vibrant little peeps!

I’d taken a photo of it lying prone in the box [see above], and now I took another of the bird sitting up. Uploading both pictures to my Facebook page, I asked if any of my friends could advise me about this feeding/non-feeding matter.

Before long, responses started coming in. A woman who takes care of parrots wrote, “If you leave it in the box overnight, it will be dead in the morning,” echoing my own intuition. She suggested I give it some chicken. Someone else suggested I use raw chicken, and chew it up first.

Barbara, my wife, found a medicine dropper. I gave our guest a couple of droppers of water, which it seemed to accept. A bit later, though, another person wrote in, “Parent birds don’t feed water to their young. The babies get their water from their food.”

I discontinued the water, but went to work defrosting a piece of frozen raw chicken. I chewed it thoroughly, washing my mouth out afterward, and brought it with my hand from my mouth to that of the bird. It took a tiny bit of nudging to get the creature to open its mouth, but it soon wolfed down the lump of chewed chicken with real gusto! I continued this practice at intervals of a couple hours for as long as I was up. Each time, the bird hungrily grabbed and swallowed the food.

Our phone rang. It was a couple we knew, who’d seen my post on Facebook. Both the man and the woman thought our bird looked more like an owl than a hawk. That resonated with me, too. I’d briefly noted that the baby had a hook nose, like an owl. Barbara and I had also been hearing owls hooting at night from somewhere near our home for several weeks, although I couldn’t remember hearing them the past few nights. My friends went on to try and research what kind of owl it might be.

Meanwhile, it was getting late and I needed to get to sleep. The last thing I did was have a talk with Barbara about where in the house our bird might stay the warmest. In the end, I decided to take our little companion up to our bedroom and place the box on the little table next to my side.

It peeped and peeped, but it was still a cheerful, vibrant peep, for all its assumed neediness. Since I use a CPAP machine for my sleep apnea, I could scarcely hear the little one. I got up during the night to do one more eagerly-accepted feeding, and then slept until around 7 a.m.

Turning off my machine, I listened for my companion’s peeps. There was only silence. I became a bit alarmed. Our bird had seemed so strong! After all of Barbara’s and my encouragement, had it not made it through the night?  I quickly opened the box and poked it. The peeping resumed. It had fallen asleep, just like I had. I breathed easy.

Hospital admission


Adult great horned owl - My owl adventure
An adult great horned owl

At 9 a.m. I was at the animal Rehabilitation Hospital, five or so miles from our home. The lady at the counter took down my information and took the shoebox back to the veterinary specialists.

A little while later, she returned and told me, “It’s a great horned owl baby, five or six days old!” Before long, the tiny, fuzzy thing would grow into one of these regal and somewhat intimidating-looking adult birds!

Several people on Facebook asked me if I was going to raise the owl. I hadn’t intended to, because I’d thought the animal hospital would do that.

A day after taking in the bird, however, I received a phone call from Sherrill Cook, a Lindsay Wildlife volunteer who is the species manager for great horned owls. Sherrill asked me to mark the tree that I thought the owl came from, because during my work hours away from home the next day, she was going to come and reconnoiter, hopefully locating the nest with her binoculars. The plan, she told me, was to bring a tree climber in soon and put the baby back in its nest.

The next day Sherrill texted me that she had indeed located the nest. Saturday morning, she texted again that she was bringing the tree climber and a few volunteers, who were going to look out for the parent owls, to the site at 2 p.m. “See you there!” I replied.

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  1. Dear Dede and Cindy,
    I was going to wait until tomorrow to announce the sad event that seems to have occurred…tomorrow, because the owl expert is coming again, to see if she can discover signs of the babies.

    The sad event was that Nature, in the form of a heavy, windy storm several nights ago, up-ended the entire basket-nest from where John, the tree-climber had secured it. The nest is actually at right angles to the way a basket should be.
    I’ve been able to see no signs of either babies or parents. The parents, being nocturnal, are not usually easy to spot, and the babies, sheltered behind the comparatively “high walls” of the straw basket, were impossible to see.

    Sherrill, the owl expert, replied to my most recent email yesterday, answering a question I had: She wrote: “Birds cannot carry their babies [to a new nest]. The best we can hope for is that they landed safely on another branch or on the ground. If on the ground, they can walk…clumsily…and hide in shrubs. I will go back again on Sunday. Unfortunately unless we hear the babies, there is no way to know what happened. The one baby that was found on the ground last week is growing quickly and doing very well”

    Her last reference, to a baby found on the ground, was not the one that stayed overnight with my wife and me. It was a baby that had remained in the nest, but apparently–several days after “our” owl and a new one were put in, and the straw basket replaced the old flat nest–had been thrown out by the parents. (It could not have “fallen,” because the basket-nest sides were too high.)

    Sherrill, the owl specialist, had written me a week or ten days ago that owl parents will sometimes expel a baby from a nest if it is blind or otherwise disabled. This one is under observation at the animal hospital, last I knew they weren’t aware of why the parents had tried to get rid of it.

    So, the wildly inspiring saga in which I had the privilege of participating, seems to have been ended by an act of fickle, impersonal Nature. Perhaps the basket could have been secured better; it’s too bad.

    I will report on anything that the owl specialist adds after her visit tomorrow.

    Sadly,
    Max

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