From Blue Ridge Wildlife Center
This red-phase Eastern Screech Owl was lucky to survive after being struck by a car and being stuck in the grille for over 12 hours. Despite this traumatic event, the owl came away with no broken bones, but did have an injured left eye that required surgical evisceration (removal of the internal contents of the globe, but preservation of the sclera and surrounding structures).
While other raptors cannot be released without two perfectly good eyes, owls have the benefit of their excellent hearing that can help offset the loss of vision in one eye. However, when you have head trauma strong enough to cause such severe damage to an eye, you can sometimes have lasting damage to the brain or to the ears.
Because this kind of damage can be harder to observe on physical exam alone, owls that have a visual deficit must have their flight and hunting skills tested through what we call “mouse school.” Mouse school is essentially providing a live mouse in the enclosure of the owl and, with a game camera, observing and confirming the owl can successfully fly and catch this live prey without issue. This helps us rule out any permanent or debilitating brain or hearing damage, and ensure that the owl has the skills necessary to survive in the wild.
As long as this owl continues to heal as expected and passes mouse school, they’ll soon be cleared for release!
It’s so valuable to me to hear how much work goes into caring for wildlife. I’m glad there are people doing this work and there is funding for things like surgery and rehab. Sadly where I am, if you take a wild bird to a vet it will almost certainly be put to sleep.
It’s really expensive and time consuming. We got over 4000 animals this year and I have no idea where we get all the time and materials.
We only have 2 rehabbers that do most of the actual medical stuff like removing owl eyes, gluing turtle shells together, medicating mangey foxes, manually removing parasites, and so much more. They don’t really get much time off because animals never stop coming in, and some they have to take home because some require around the clock care up to every hour or half hour.
It’s a lot of time and resources that a vet doesn’t have the capacity to provide, as they are really providing to the owners as much as the animals, but wild animals don’t have an owner to bill or schedule with, so we’re really in a different business. We do still utilize vets when something is beyond our ability, but our clinic is paying for it, whereas if an individual brought a wild animal to a vet, I don’t think most people would take in that financial responsibility, and I don’t know if vets are equipped to hold onto the animals while they recover since wildlife can have numerous diseases and parasites a vet wouldn’t want people’s domestic animals catching.
