Injured Barred Owl Resting Comfortably After Being Rescued in Fairfield

John Laiacone, our sanctuary manager, with the rescued Barred Owl. Connecticut Audubon Society photo by Chris Harrison.

Fairfield, Oct. 22, 2014 ­- Quick action by two visitors to a Connecticut Audubon Society sanctuary in Fairfield and by Connecticut Audubon staff helped save a Barred Owl that had injured a wing most likely while hunting for food.

On Saturday, two people who were hiking at the Larsen Sanctuary, which is adjacent to Connecticut Audubon’s Center at Fairfield, stopped at the center’s nature store and showed the staff a video they had just taken of the owl. They also told the staff where in the sanctuary they had shot the video.

Sanctuary manager John Laiacone, Jill Mahar, who works for Connecticut Audubon as a teacher-naturalist and animal caretaker, and Chris Harrison, who has conducted bird surveys for the organization, headed into the woods to find it.

“We all split up and looked through the woods off-trail to try to find the owl,” Jill said. “After a while we were all pretty far from each other and I decided it was a lost cause because Barred Owls’ camouflage is so good and if it didn’t want to be found it just wouldn’t be.

“I then heard faint ‘peep peeps,’ like the call of a spring peeper, and thought I would look for it while I was out walking around. After a minute of looking for the frog, I FOUND THE OWL! The Barred Owl was actually ‘peeping,’ which I have never heard before.”

She said she watched the bird for several minutes and waited for John and Chris to give up their search and walk back towards her. When they got close enough, she called them over.

“I went around the thicket so I was behind the owl,” said Jill, who started at Connecticut Audubon as a volunteer when she was a teenager. “I tried to scare it out into the open area first by just walking up to it as close as I could but that did not work because it was no longer moving. Chris was a little to the side and then, using our bodies and arms, we ducked underneath the pricker bushes to lift them up and out of John’s way.”

John Laiacone slipped under the bushes and covered the owl in a towel he had brought. Owls, hawks and other injured or trapped birds often become calm and less stressed when covered in a towel or other piece of soft fabric. In this case, it also prevented the owl from flapping and further damaging its injured wing.

With the bird safely covered in the towel, Chris Harrison drove it to Wildlife in Crisis, a non-profit in Weston that cares for injured raptors and other wildlife.

Barred Owls are fairly common in Connecticut and nest in or near the 155-acre Larsen Sanctuary, on Burr Street. They are often heard in the late afternoon or evening in spring and summer hooting their familiar “who-cooks-for-you, who-cooks-for-you-all” call. (If you’ve never seen a Barred Owl, visit the raptor compounds at our Center at Fairfield or Center at Glastonbury, where we have several birds of prey that are injured or otherwise not fit to live in the wild.)

Peter Reid, the assistant director at Wildlife in Crisis, said the Barred Owl – and adult male – had suffered wing damage and was in reasonably good shape. When the bird recovers sufficiently, it will be put into the organization’s flight cage – an enclosure that is about 40 feet long, 20 feet wide and 25 feet high, in which injured birds can test their flying abilities – and observed by Wildlife in Crisis staff. He said the Barred Owl will spend the winter there and that there’s a 50-50 chance it will recover enough to be released back into the wild in the spring.

Connecticut Audubon sends its thanks to the two hikers, who left after showing the video, and to the folks at Wildlife in Crisis. And we commend John Laiacone, Jill Mahar and Chris Harrison for a job well done.