A parliament in the yard:Wyoming Lifestyle Blog and Photography

When Outdoor Guy calls “Hey, come see something,” I know it’s going to be a good day.

That something today was a great horned owl.  He was hanging out next to our yard, all black beak and huge talons, giving our dogs the stink-eye.  The owl allowed us to get incredibly close, so my husband suspected something was wrong.  Owls aren’t usually very tolerant of people, especially if they are on the ground instead of tucked protectively in a tree.

The owl was missing its left eye.  The wound looked old, but the owl’s behavior told us something was wrong.  At one point, the owl tipped over and failed to right itself.  It just laid there on our lawn, wings akimbo.

“I wonder if it’s starving and sick,” I said to Outdoor Guy as he reached for his phone to call the warden, affectionately known as Mr. Luke to our family.

My husband has a permit from Game and Fish to handle and euthanize wildlife in our state if it’s necessary.  He’s occasionally called into action when the wardens and biologists in our region are busy.  But this is Mr. Luke’s district so my husband always gets Luke’s okay in dealing critters other than pheasants.

“I hate to just leave him to suffer,” my husband told Luke on the phone.  “We’ve picked up a few around here that were just skin and bones because they were slowly starving to death.”

Owls depend on their vision to hunt.  Their eyes aren’t eyeballs like yours and mine, so much as they are tubes.  These tube eyes are completely immobile, requiring an owl to turn its head to get a bead on you.  But the feature gives owls binocular vision, giving them great depth perception allowing them to really zero in on prey.  So missing an eye could render an owl unable to hunt and feed itself.

“He might have just hit our tree and rung his bell,” Outdoor Guy conceded.  The men agreed to keep an eye on the owl but not to intervene just yet.

The owl had righted itself and was puffed up in the way birds do when they want to appear intimidating.  But on this poor guy, it just looked sad.  We both watched for a few minutes as the owl stared back at us.  He had asymmetrical ears, which is another great critter adaptation.  Ears located at different heights help the owl pinpoint the location of sounds in multiple directions.  He also had some amazing talons, two pointing forward and two pointing back.

I asked my husband if we could at least herd him to the cover of the trees for his recovery period.  As my husband approached the owl again, it suddenly spread its wings and flew about five feet.  Then another five feet.  Then he was up and away, flying across our road into the neighbor’s pasture before finally landing some 200 yards from us.  We speculated that the owl probably had run into the big maple tree in our yard and stunned itself.  We both hoped his recovery would be that simple.  The truth of the matter is, we don’t know.  We’ll keep a watch out for Odin, as I like to think of him now (so named for the Norse god who is reputed to have sacrificed his body for wisdom).  But his survival is up to him.

The Wyoming Game and Fish Department gets frequent calls about injured or hurt owls.  People call asking if wildlife personnel can come rescue them or take them to a rehabilitation center.  The truth is, there is little that can be done. There are simply more birds in need than there are rehabilitation centers available.  A bird like Odin, with such an injury, would likely live out the rest of his life in captivity.  And I have to wonder just how fair that is to a creature meant for soaring and swooping and hunting and living wild.  Is it right to impose our human values on so wild a creature just so we can feel better?  Is any life better than no life at all for wildlife?  My own personal ethic says probably not.  As much as I hate seeing animals suffer, I also understand that my motives for saving them involve some degree of selfishness on my part.  I’m imposing my view of what is right, what is fair.  Mother nature and the natural world have much, much different rules.

My mind tends toward the philosophical on most days, but even more so after time spent around wild creatures and wild places.  This morning as I walked our dogs in the shelter belt, I kept my eyes lifted to the tree tops in search of him, musing about life and death and what is “right.”  My hope is that Odin will live to see many more days and that we have the honor of encountering him again.  But if not, I’ll always remember a few moments in our yard with a plucky owl with one eye whom I had the great fortune to photograph.

Teresa