This morning I read a news item about how older generations are significantly more likely to answer the door for a stranger than younger generations, and how older people are much more curious than annoyed or fearful when a stranger knocks. (Walt Hickey’s wonderful Numlock News, which I read every morning, is full of fascinating items like this, with links to his sources.) As a representative of the Baby Boomer generation, opening the door for strangers certainly applies to me, at least if my personal history is any indication.
In the summer of 1991 or 1992 while Russ was out of town for a scientific meeting, about 11 pm when my kids were sound asleep and I had just put on my jammies, there was a loud knock at the front door. I could see out the living room window that it was two men, pretty dirty, wearing sleeveless t-shirts. Their eyes were red-rimmed and they looked unsteady—I presumed they’d been drinking—but one looked vaguely familiar so I grabbed a robe and opened the door to see what they wanted.
The reason the one looked familiar is that he’d been on a construction crew digging the foundation for the addition on our house a year or so before. While they were on the job, I’d been rehabbing four baby Blue Jays who frequently sat in a back window watching the backhoe, their little heads going back and forth as the bucket moved, exactly the way we depict people’s heads moving in unison during a tennis match. The workmen were charmed.
Now this one and his friend had spent the day fishing (and, yes, drinking). On their drive home, they’d hit an owl and pulled over to try to help it. They told me it didn’t look too hurt and they didn’t know what else to do, so they brought it to me. I didn’t normally treat hawks or owls, but I could certainly keep it overnight and get it to the Raptor Center the next day, so I went out to their pickup with them to get it.
I don’t know how many beers it takes to cloud your mind enough to forget that a closed cooler is not the best place to put a living creature if you want to keep it that way. When they opened the top, there it was—a gorgeous Great Horned Owl—its body still warm, suffocated.
Now I was dealing with a dead owl and two drunks on a crying jag. There was nothing I could do for the bird, but I sat down with the humans on the front porch steps and tried to console them. They felt abysmally guilty even as I assured them that it can be almost impossible to avoid an owl flying in at windshield height from the side on a dark, forested road, and that there was a good chance the bird had internal injuries that would have doomed it even if they’d put it in something with a supply of air. I reassured them that they’d done the best they could, but they were still sniffing forlornly when they left.
As a rehabber, I had a salvage permit and normally would have brought the bird to the university museum. But I was also my daughter’s Brownie troop leader. At the time, the Brownie and Girl Scout handbooks were dreadful when it came to nature study, offering nothing close to my sons’ Cub Scout Webelos activities, much less the Boy Scout Bird Study merit badge requirements that I’d helped several Boy Scout troops with. But the Girl Scouts did allow troops to earn special project badges if approved by the area Girl Scout Council, and I was in the process of designing a special bird study badge for my troop. I got the go-ahead from the Girl Scout office for us to dissect the owl as one component of our special badge. I never told the girls exactly how the bird died—just that it had been hit by a car.
I couldn’t forget dissecting the owl even if I wanted to, because I wrote about it in my first book, For the Birds: An Uncommon Guide(still in print!). Here’s what I wrote:
My Brownie Troop dissects a Great Horned Owl that was brought to me, dead. I’m required to bring carcasses to the university, but the curator lets me use this one for teaching. I’m allergic to feathers—my sneezing shoots them everywhere. Before I pick up a scalpel, we look like we’re in a bizarre pillow fight.
Russ took some photos of us studying the owl, but I can’t find them. Jeff Sonstegard, illustrator of For the Birds: An Uncommon Guide, drew this for the October 22 entry from one of those pictures.
We talk about how sad we feel when birds die. If this owl had been left on the road, a scavenging raccoon or crow might also have been hit. We study talons, eyes, and pull back feathers to reveal enormous ears. Two girls draw back when I make the first cut, but most crowd in. We slice through huge pectoral muscles and saw away at the keel. The liver is discolored from the car’s impact. The heart looks like a chicken heart. We trace the digestive system. When the bird is a hollow shell, we finally see lungs, way in back, interspersed with ribs. I stick a straw down the trachea and blow, inflating air sacs like balloons, but the lungs stay flat. My Brownies know more about owls than they ever hoped to, and are pleased and proud of themselves—not one girl threw up.
As fascinated as she was with the dead owl, my daughter was much happier dealing with living birds. This Ruby-throated Hummingbird had a sprained wing but with Katie’s help, was soon releasable. I’m endlessly proud of my three kids who, as adults, are wonderfully compassionate toward animals and people both.
I, too, had an adventure dissecting a Great Horned Owl. Not to be innappropriately gross, but it was for a bone, or osteo museum. They are roughly constructed birds for cold temperate climates. I gave up trying to remove the skin after the feathers. It is tenacious attached to their bones. We gave up on the Turkey Vultures for the same reason, and buried them hoping that bugs and worms would "clean" the bones, in subsurface wooden compartments made by the college maintenance department. Smelling too bad, maintenance eventually had to throw them out. One of our more embarrassingly unsuccessful endeavors. Birds are tough.
I always love how you make everything a teachable moment for kids.
I, too, had an adventure dissecting a Great Horned Owl. Not to be innappropriately gross, but it was for a bone, or osteo museum. They are roughly constructed birds for cold temperate climates. I gave up trying to remove the skin after the feathers. It is tenacious attached to their bones. We gave up on the Turkey Vultures for the same reason, and buried them hoping that bugs and worms would "clean" the bones, in subsurface wooden compartments made by the college maintenance department. Smelling too bad, maintenance eventually had to throw them out. One of our more embarrassingly unsuccessful endeavors. Birds are tough.