Wrong cavity

[Hummer]

I enjoy working with wildlife and over the years I've encountered a number of situations where birds and other wildlife have gotten into unfortunate predicaments. I've pulled starlings from chimneys, squirrels and woodrats from sewer vent pipes, ducklings from street drains, a screech-owl and baby racoons from trash cans, and last year a wren from my dryer vent pipe inside the laundry room. Today was a new experience as I went to a house in town that had an owl trapped inside a wood stove in the living room. Fortunately, the stove hadn't been used for some time. The bird had been there for three days over the long weekend because the homeowner didn't want to handle the owl fearing injury from the sharp beak and talons.

The house has a standard 8" chimney pipe with a chimney cap but apparently the screening had fallen out of place. Small owls nest in natural tree cavities. When the little owl went into the chimney cap to investigate, it dropped about 15 feet. Inside the stove was one unruffled Western Screech-owl perched on a spark shelf below the chimney. There was no apparent injury so I set the bird on the ground to make sure it could fly. After getting it's bearings the owl flew directly to a dead cottonwood snag in the neighbor's yard and disappeared into a hidden cavity. I walked to the tree and the bird popped it's head out a couple of times, seemingly comfortable to be back home.

[KestrelBike]

Nice, a happy ending!

quick, lame owl story: I grew up on the west coast where we've done a good job of removing all natural flora & fauna from our concrete environment. When I went to college in the midwest, it was my first time in cold winters and such, and seeing so much natural wildlife still in society. Anyways, one night I was drudging to the science building at probably 8pm to work on a physics lab, feeling pretty bummed. The class was kicking my butt and I was having difficulties understanding the material. There was a good foot of snow surrounding the sidewalks, and as I got to the entrance, there was this awesome owl just hanging out at headlevel on some bare tree branches next to the doors. It was probably just a barn owl, and we just looked at each other as I went into the door, but it was still very cool to see my first owl in the wild. Really made my night and instantly made me feel a lot better about things in general.

[cstone]

Very cool! Thank you for sharing.

[buffalobo]

Good on you for breaking him outta jail.

[thvigil11]

Great story.




Must... resist... making a joke about "Wrong Cavity" and "Happy Ending"...

[beast556]

Cool looking owl, good to see you got it out and set it free. Im sure after 3 days he was happy to be free again.

[Irving]

That owl fared a lot better than the bird that got into our chimney one year. We didn't find it until months later.

[Gman]

Pictures or it never happened!

Just kidding, cool rescue story.

[9mmJ]

Thanks for getting the little guy out of trouble.

I'm curious, how do you get a squirrel out of a sewer vent pipe?

[SamuraiCO]

Win for the good guys. We have a pair of owls nesting in the cottonwoods near our home and they will go from roof to roof in the night when they are hunting. They get really loud when they are on your roof makes my dogs bark.