This is the Dave story as yesterday’s Hook, Line, and Sinker, but from the rescue center instead of the local news, so it’s the same owl, but different pics and info.
We have seen some crazy things in the years of helping wild creatures of Illinois. An occasional bird comes in tangled in fishing line. Most the time it’s a young songbird that has been caught while in the nest due to the parents bringing fishing line back to the nest. The other common case is a raptor flying into dangling line from trees around lakes or ponds. Usually it’s not too difficult to unwrap the birds - but recently we received the most tangled mess of an owl we have ever seen ! This Great -horned Owl was flying along - minding her own business when she somehow ran into one of those massive gob of snagged lures and line hanging from a power line. This bird had almost 300 grams of lead, line, hooks and lures hanging from it. One hook was embedded in the wing ( it’s a miracle there wasn’t any more ).
Springfield police officers actually waded out into the water to retrieve her as she got caught on a limb over water. A call to the Macon County sheriff was made and they came out to the irc to inform us that the owl was coming in.
We were all a bit shocked when we saw the amount of stuff on the bird. Some calculated snips here and there, along with very careful examination of the entire bird and one qiant hook removal from the fleshy part of the 4 downloads complete an enclosure before she moved to the superflight complex for final flight work.
