Owl Story

Hi everyone, 

I had a very interesting bird encounter yesterday morning. It was nearly 8am and I had just arrived at the corner of the building where I work. It's a tall, glass fronted office block in a business park. Suddenly I could hear many angry screeching birds, and I looked up to see a cloud of about ten crows and magpies, all chasing another bird. It was a barn owl, which in its panic flew straight into the glass of the building. It seemed to recover and fly away.

When I got to the entrance of the building a colleague of mine was standing there staring at something on the ground. It was the owl. It was lying still, breathing very rapidly and its wing seemed to be broken, lying at a strange angle.

Luckily there is a vet only about 100m from our building. My colleague went inside to the cafe and got a box. I wrapped the owl in my cardigan and put it in the box. It didn't struggle much. We took it to the vet immediately, so from its injury to getting help at the vet must have been about 10 minutes.

I called the vet this morning and they told me the owl didn't have a broken wing but it had a concussion and had been struggling to move around and grip things with its feet. They said they will contact a local wildlife organisation today who should be able to release the owl at some point. 

I'm hoping I did the right thing. I know we must be very careful about taking wild birds,  but in this case I saw the injury happen myself, and I thought the owl would be in trouble if left in the middle of the pavement at a building that was about to get very busy for the day.