Too Antigonish

This poor guy—a juvenile barred owl—showed up yesterday afternoon on our back patio. He had an injured foot and could no longer fly—although whether from exhaustion or injury was unclear. 

We contacted our local wildlife rescue and they were eager to get him in as soon as possible. Great!

Except...at current funding levels they can no longer send someone to actually fetch your injured wildlife. You bring the wildlife to them.

In an attempt to be as helpful as possible, however, you are sent a very kindly worded PDF titled (at least in our particular case) How to Catch an Injured Raptor.

It begins by emphatically noting that safety is absolutely the first priority. If by any chance you remain unconvinced about the paramount importance of safety, a graphic description of raptor talons and the damage they can inflict immediately follows.

That softens you up quite nicely for the part where they tell you to encase yourself in safety gear (heavy gloves and jacket, eye protections, etc.) and to be aware of both the current and any potential future location(s) of talons and beak at all times.

Fear successfully instilled, you are then presented with three potential methods for catching your raptor and securing it within a well-ventilated cardboard box. I won't detail each method but they involved various degrees of sneaking as well as a variety of tools to aid capture—including in one instance, a "gentle" shovel.

In choosing which method to pursue you are advised to consider such factors the size and fierceness of your raptor, its levels of agitation and injury, your own confidence, etc.

Following all of that build-up, we were lucky enough to ambush our guy quite easily. No shovels were required. Owl transport and delivery to wildlife rescue was also a breeze.

We've been told that we'll receive an update on his condition in about three days. The foot didn't look too awful but he was also horribly stressed and exhausted. It's hard to say which way things will go.

We've had one or two nesting pairs of barred owls near us for the last ten years or so. We love to hear them hooting away in the night and early mornings in the fall and winter and we catch glimpses of the little ones every spring and summer. We sort of think of them as our owls.

I hope this one makes it. If he does, they say they'll bring him back here to his home territory for release!

FYI:

The calling of barred owls... Here