3 Owl Families Come Together as One

The three Barred Owls together in the mini flight. The baby up top got up there on their own after having jumped down!

From Illinois Raptor Center

I’ll be showing a few patients who are all in together now, but I especially want to focus on one of them.

Almost a month ago a Barred Owl was found at the base of a utility pole near a remote road, clearly having suffered a collision of some kind. The kind soul who found him held onto him until we could meet at our hospital the next day. We didn’t find any breaks thankfully, but the owl had clearly suffered head trauma. He couldn’t stand, he couldn’t even hold himself upright laying down. He was very disoriented and showed signs of something akin to vertigo, trying to catch his balance even as he was laying down.

Not finding any other significant issues on our exam, we kept him on oxygen, antiinflammatories, pain meds and supplemental warmth in our hospital ICU for about a week and a half. The first few days were rough, with him struggling to improve and unable to feed himself.

Several days after he came in I arrived to see him standing, and our volunteer that day can confirm I did a happy dance seeing him up! We slowly got him eating on his own, a bit at a time. We moved him to our larger indoor caging to monitor his ability to stand and perch, and after another week and a half of monitoring, seeing him eating well and staying up, we’ve now moved him outdoors to one of our mini flights, so that he can move around and build up more strength as he adjusts to being back outside before moving into our Superflight!

But he’s not alone. Because around that same time, we received two separate calls and took in two nestling Barred Owls who had ended up out of their nest too soon. Normally our goal is to “nestcue” or renest those babies, and Jacques was working on plans to do so for one that we suspected still had a sibling in the nest, but the weather has been challenging for doing so safely and the other one was not in a great location to safely return.

So now those babies, who spent 2-3 weeks in or incubators (followers of this page saw the first being fed in one with a puppet, just a day or two before the second chick arrived!) are also ready to spend more time outside learning to fly and getting around. And given that we have an adult doing the same, it was a perfect situation to give them all that opportunity while allowing the babies to have an adult role model to learn from as they grow and get stronger and closer to eventually being released back to the wild again.

So here are some photos of them, the now and the then! These guys are here and getting better every day, and that wouldn’t be possible without you, our supporters! Two dollar Tuesday is coming up next week, and as indicated by the name, every little bit, even a dollar or two, all added together as a community adds up to saving these birds, feeding them, and giving them all that second chance. Thank you!