Rescued by Ohio State and sent back into the wild
The Lima campus community helped restore a barred owl’s health and will to fly, before releasing it in the Tecumseh Natural Area.
Barred owls rely on the camouflage of their brown and white plumage to escape notice, nestled in holes in trees and awaiting nightfall to launch away and hunt on soundless wings. That’s why it seemed strange to zoology student Rachel Ryan when she noticed a barred owl sitting on the ground in broad daylight near a building on the Ohio State Lima campus. Ryan turned to Zach Walton for advice—Walton is a librarian on campus and a bird enthusiast, serving as a board member of his local Audubon chapter.
Walton figured maybe the owl was just eccentric. “Birds are individuals. Sometimes they just do weird things,” he says. But when he approached, the owl didn’t budge. It just sat with its eyes closed. He realized something was very wrong. Had it smashed into a window nearby? More worryingly, was it infected with something like West Nile virus?
After a flurry of texts between Zach and other experts, including his wife, Marie Walton ’23, a naturalist at Johnny Appleseed Metropolitan Park District, they decided to bundle the owl in a plastic bin and take it up I-75 to Nature’s Nursery Center for Wildlife Rehabilitation and Conservation Education near Toledo.
The owl’s case was puzzling. The animal rescue found a minor fungal infection, but they weren’t sure why the owl had deteriorated so much. “Maybe the owl was a little bit depressed,” Marie says. “It just felt slightly not great and was like, ‘I give up.’”
Nature’s Nursery, for its part, had no intention of giving up on the gloomy owl, treating it for weeks and feeding it by hand. A fan club sprang up on campus as people waited to find out its fate. They followed its progress via a Teams channel where the Waltons posted information from the rescue. “We checked on it a lot. We were very invested in the owl,” Marie says.
Finally, the owl snapped out of its funk with behavior reminiscent of a kid after days home sick from school. “It went a little stir crazy,” Zach says, “and they found it one day clinging upside down to the roof of its cage.”
More than a month after the owl entered treatment, well-wishers gathered to watch its release into an ideal habitat: Tecumseh Natural Area, an old-growth forest of about 200 acres right on the Lima campus. No longer listless, the feisty bird clicked its beak to warn its benefactors and took off like a shot into the forest.
As for why it chose to flop down on campus in the first place, who knows? Sometimes birds just do weird things.
