A few of you have been to my neighborhood, and Faure even lives here among the oaks & sycamores & elms. Its a great established neighborhood where we know a lot of the people, and while springtime brings the mosquitos, there's plenty of fireflies to attract us to the outdoors anyway. On the way home from town lake tonight, I swerved my Honda around a little grey blob in the road that looked to be a hit squirrel. Chaz thought he saw differently, and sure enough after he had me turn around, this little guy was in the road.
Little more than a handful, the barn owl was clattering his beak, uninjured, but obviously not quite ready to fend for him or herself in traffic on Oakwood Drive. Chaz scooped him up in a rag so we could get him off the road, and we hurried to the house to look up what to do to see that he survived. In the few minutes he was with us in our backyard, we got these photos, and called for some help.
Austin Wildlife Rescue had someone answering the phones that said it wasn't unusual for barn owls to take a tumble out of the nest a bit early; we saw that he had some energy after resting on our patio table - he tried a couple of times to move about, and crawled quite readily on Chaz's hand. Their advice was to put him back on a tree limb close to where we found him. The sycamore trees under which we found him didn't have anything we could reach, but an oak across the street afforded a few branches where we could leave our little friend. He got ambitious on the first try, and fell off the branch on the other side of the tree, but managed to find his balance and stay put with a little help. With any luck, he'll clatter enough tonight over the din of traffic to attract his mom and get back to his nest. Moms have a way of hearing those things, you know.
