Wednesday, August 04, 2010

Call me Snappy


We don't often get the whole story of what happened to a bird that makes it come to Bird TLC. I love it when we hear from people who bring us up to date or as Paul Harvey would have said "and here's the rest of the story".


Hello,

Good to see an update of the Bethel Short-Eared Owl on your blog, “Of Grebes & Owls”. But sorry to see that the main website (www.birdtlc.net) and none of the links (maybe except your blog) hasn’t been updated since last summer.

My family brought in the owl to ADF&G. We were berry-picking between Bethel and Eek when a juvenile owl took off from next to us. Being young, it could only fly a short distance. One of our dogs gave chase, but before I could stop it, the dog was upon the young owl, grabbing its body and shook it. The dog left when I shouted at it to get away, but the owl was shaken up and hurt (broken leg and all) and at first I believed it wasn’t going to survive.

We took the owl back to camp and bound it tightly in a towel (like a body splint) and left it in our boat cabin. By the next morning, it had escaped its body splint and perched on the dash okay. We had a bunch of kids (7 kids, age 2-14, from 2 families) and they took a liking to it. When we first treated it, it snapped its bill and hissed. So the kids started calling it “Snappy.”

We brought it back to Bethel and then to ADF&G. When we arrived in Bethel, we fed it strips of meat. When ADF&G said they’d send it to Bird TLC, we checked your website every day for news of the owl.

I’d like to help out with its rehabilitation if I could. Thanks for responding.

Allen Joseph
Bethel, AK


How interesting of a story is that. Thanks Allen for telling us this story and taking care of Snappy until he got to Bird TLC.

I guess I'll get to updating the website now. (BLUSH)

1 comment:

Britt said...

Thanks for sharing the story with us Allen and for helping get the owl to us. I got to see "Snappy" the other day. He was standing at the front of his kennel looking around and looked very curious with everything going on.