ACADIA NATIONAL PARK, Maine — Sometimes, instead of using a human-size litter to carry an injured visitor out of the park, a basket or even a small cooler will suffice.
Rangers put both to use this past weekend in a rescue mission, but it wasn’t a hiker they were helping out. It was a baby great horned owl that was found on the ground Saturday by some park visitors.
With the help of Ann Rivers, director of Acadia Wildlife Foundation, park rangers went to the site and retrieved the owl, which had fallen out of a nest and dropped about 20 feet onto a bed of moss. Rangers declined to say where the owl was found in order to prevent people from trying to find the owl’s nest.
Rivers kept the owl overnight at the foundation and, on Sunday, returned to the nest site with rangers as they placed a basket next to the nest.
“The nest didn’t look too sturdy,” Ranger Richard Rechholtz said Monday morning. “It looks like it might have been damaged by the wind.”
A ranger was hoisted up to the nest site on Sunday in a bucket truck and, after placing the pine-needle-lined basket in the tree, the owl chick was lifted up to the basket in a small blue cooler and then placed by the ranger in the basket.
But the bird did not like the basket, apparently. Officials went back to the nest site Monday morning and again found the baby owl on the ground. The parents were nowhere to be seen.
Rivers said Monday that she thinks the owl parents are young and inexperienced. The place where they built the nest is heavily visited in the warmer months and is near a busy road, she said.
“The place they chose to have a nest is awful,” Rivers said. “There’s no sign of [the parents].”
Owls normally are highly protective of their nesting sites, she added, and in this case the parents were facing prospects of constantly defending the site from visitors they would have perceived as intruders.
Rivers speculated that the baby owl fell out of the nest because it hadn’t been fed and became agitated. She said she does not think the parents abandoned the baby, which raptors almost never do, but that they just don’t know how to properly care for it.
“Most animals need their parents for a lot of reasons,” she said. “Birds are like the rest of us. They get experience with age.”
Rechholtz added that the baby owl appears to be in good health. On Saturday night, while being kept at the foundation in the Bar Harbor village of Town Hill, the baby owl ate three mice, he said.
Rivers said the plan is to return the owl to the wild, so the foundation is trying to minimize how often it is handled by humans.
She said she plans to take the bird to Avian Haven in Freedom, which will look for another pair of nesting great horned owls. Officials there might be able to put the baby in the nest and have the parents raise it as if it were their own, she said.
“That’s what we’re going to try to do,” Rivers said.
Follow BDN reporter Bill Trotter on Twitter at @billtrotter.
How wonderful that people care about and go to such lengths for a small creature.
That baby is so cute, thank you for trying to save its life.
Shouldn’t screw with nature
Are you representing the mice ?
These idiotic parents built their nest in an inappropriate place, abandoned their baby and now the tax payers have to pay to clean up this mess. How did their stupidity get to be my problem? The owls should pay us back every penny and stop being such losers! They should not be allowed to breed.
See how silly this argument sounds when applied to inexperienced wildlife parents? I wish we could realize how unhelpful it is when we talk about inexperienced human parents.
True enough sedward and lets hope none of all those visitors don’t tell the owls about getting welfare or more inexperienced owls will start procreating earlier. :)
Great horned owls don’t build nests; they use nests built by other birds.
The more I think about this, the more it bothers me. They picked up the owl and took it away from the nest site overnight. If the parents were around, they probably assumed a predator had gotten their baby and abandoned the nest.
Great horned owls aren’t endangered. Humans (even well meaning ones) should just leave them alone.
The baby owl cannot be put back in the nest by its parents. Therefore, rescue of it from exposure on the ground is a necessity. Generally, you are correct about leaving wild animals alone, but this little guy was truly defenseless.
Lets keep it and place it on Maine care as a ward of the state.
I’m sure daddy owl isn’t around to care for his cute little one, He doesn’t give a Hoot what happens to his kids.
Does anyone else wonder why journalists seem not to be interested enough to use the acknowledged references to new-born or immature wildlife species? We are constantly treated to “baby” this and “baby” that, when there are more accurate terms such as owlet, fawn, cub, chick, calf, fry, smolt… you get the picture. It must be a matter of linguistic laziness, lack of curiosity or simply not having a more useful vocabulary. I don’t know which, but, at any rate, it doesn’t do much for the writer. It certainly doesn’t do much to enlighten readers who might stand a little vocabulary broadening themselves.
Ann Rivers of Acadia Wildlife is a highly-skilled and caring person. This baby owl will grow and eventually fly free. Hooray!
“owl parents are young and inexperienced.”
-This is why we need mandatory owl parenting course legislation…
So much for “natural balance”