It doesn’t matter how many times we admit a barn owl, we are always mesmerised by them.
Unfortunately for this beauty, he was discovered, unresponsive, by the side of a road. But, the kindness of strangers prevailed, and he was picked up and brought in.
Having cleared his eye exam, something that is a common issue in birds of prey that suffer road traffic accidents, the barn owl had thankfully only suffered a graze to one of his talons.
Rather than stress him further, the owl was given some mild pain relief, bedded down and monitored for the first 24hours. Once he had shown signs of no residual effects from his collision, the barn owl was test flown in one of our large aviaries, and beautifully passing with flying colours.
Barn owls perform a behaviour known as “toe dusting”, this is a sign of stress and aggression, and consists of shaking their head back and forth over their feet. This makes it easy for our vet team to identify how the owl is doing, whilst in care.
See him performing this behaviour below –
Just three days after arriving in care, two of our volunteers had the lucky task of releasing the barn owl back into the area he had come from! You can, just about, see his release below, due to the nocturnal nature of many of our owl species, releasing them at dusk provides them with the better opportunity to re-adjust to their surroundings.
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