Penny and Bert Dekeyser had an unexpected visitor for two days at the end of April.
They rescued a great horned owlet, that was still too young to fly, near the family farm in Verdant Valley.
“My husband saw it running down the ditch and wasn’t sure what it was. Then he stopped the truck and looked, and it ran into the hedge,” said Penny Dekeyser.
Bert went to get Penny, and a pair of leather gloves.
They think the owl must have walked to the ditch, because it was nowhere close to a nest.
They captured the little owl and housed it in a dog kennel, and Penny contacted the Calgary Wildlife Rehabilitation Centre.
“In the meantime, we fed it little chunks of steak cut in really small pieces on a tooth pick and then water through a medicine syringe,” Penny explains.
She said the owlet would hiss and clack its beak at her when she put her hand in the kennel, but when it started getting food and water, would come right to the edge of the cage and just sit and look at her, or eat.
Penny took the orphaned owl to the wildlife centre after two days because the centre warned her the little owl risked getting sick.
“When I spoke to them they said it couldn’t eat steak for very long because that wasn’t their diet - they needed to have regurgitated mice for their diet or they would get some kind of disease.”
When Penny took the owlet to the wildlife centre, staff told her it was a healthy baby owl.
They also let her know there was a great horned owl at the centre that would act as a surrogate parent for the orphan.
Staff at the wildlife rehabilitation centre expect the owl to be there through the summer and into the fall, until it can fly well enough and catch mice on its own on a consistent basis.
Penny plans on paying a visit to the little owl to see how he/she is doing.
Penny said about thirty years ago, her family nursed a full-grown great horned owl back to health and then released it into the wild.
