A bird of prey is not a pet, and if you’re getting up close and personal with one, you’re probably in a zoo.
So when a great horned owl got stuck in Phil Pentecost’s Salmon Arm backyard, he knew something was wrong.
The bird had got itself caught on a barbed wire fence, with the wire stuck in its wing.
“I hate to see any animal hurt,” said Pentecost.
The bird was holding itself up on the fence when he managed to cut the wire. The owl was able to get into the grass but Pentecost couldn’t make the second cut on his own.
“It kept snapping its beak at me and looking at me real mean,” he said.
After several calls to neighbours, Keith MacGregor was able to help, assessing the bird that was now lying in the grass.
“The wire was quite badly embedded in the bird’s left wing,” he said. “It was very wary of course. It would start hissing and clapping its beak. It was feeling very defensive.”
MacGregor put a towel over the hissing bird’s head to calm it down, something he remembered hearing about birds of prey. Covering its eyes calmed the bird immensely, he said.
Together, they cut the wire, leaving three inches of it in the bird’s wing and loaded it up in a box.
MacGregor said he was cautious because the owl had large talons and he had never dealt with such a bird before.
He took it to B.C. Wildlife Park in Kamloops, where he learned it was a young adult great horned owl.
Staff were able to remove the wire and determined the wing wasn’t broken.
They put the owl on antibiotics because the barbed wire had cut some deep holes into the bird’s tissue, said Adrienne Clay, animal health technologist at the wildlife rehab centre.
Its flying was assessed a little over a week after it was brought in, Clay said, and it is expected to be released back into the area, near Gardom Lake, sometime soon.
As of July 30, the great horned owl was still in rehabilitation, but doing well.
“I think the important thing here is I didn’t want to cause it any more damage,” said MacGregor. “Get it to someone qualified who can help it.”