The orphaned owl found along 18th Street near North Street Tuesday about 10 p.m. was rescued by the Humane Society of Perry Wednesday morning and transported to an avian rehabilitation specialist in the Des Moines neighborhood of Beaverdale.
Wearing a light dusting of snow from the morning’s precipitation but otherwise little changed from its state a few hours earlier, the owl was made temporarily comfortable in a styrofoam coffee cup prior to transport by Humane Society of Perry volunteer Joyce Conklin VanKirk.
Perry Police Department Officer Wayne Schuttler responded to the reported owl Tuesday night, inspecting the small raptor and concluding it appeared to be injured or ill. Schuttler made contact with VanKirk.
“The way he described it was that it was pretty non-responsive,” VanKirk said, “and he thought that it had been hit by a car. That’s what he suspected. It didn’t sound very good at all to me. He said, ‘I could put it back in the tree,’ and I said, ‘That’s a good idea and if in the morning it’s still alive and showing any good signs, then we could make arrangements.'”
Nature and the will of God having taken their course overnight, the baby owl was alive and maybe a little more responsive.
“I don’t know very much about birds,” VanKirk said. “That isn’t what I’ve had much experience with. If it had a broken wing or some other injury, I don’t have the medical knowledge to do very much, of course. I’m a lay person. My only option would be to pass it on to a wildlife group of which I’m a member.”
She drove the feathered victim to Beaverdale and also made contact with Kay Neumann in Dedham, Iowa, executive director of Save Our Avian Resources (SOAR), a raptor rehab group. The owl’s condition is unknown at this hour.
ThePerryNews.com will update this story as information becomes available.
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