A story of an owl

For 15 years we’ve had an old tawny owl couple living in the nearby park, where they grow chicks more or less every year. Or at least they try to: last spring they had four chicks, but when they were three months old, a goshawk took them all in one go. Three years ago they had four chicks, goshawk took three of them, one survived to adulthood. Two years ago they had three chicks, goshawk got one of them, again only one survived.

So what happened to the third – the one in the picture?

Tawny owls nest in tree cavities, and when their chicks leave the nest, they either climb higher in the tree if they can, or simply drop down. At that point they already know how to fly some so that they don’t hurt themselves on landing. After that they simply climb back – not neccessarily the same tree, but to one nearby. They are terrific climbers, too, with their beaks and talons!

This time their cavity was in such a place that the chicks could only jump. No-one saw them do it, but since their park is in the middle of the city, the word about the chicks spread quickly among the local photographers, who immediately stormed the site with their telephoto lenses.

The most experienced ones soon noticed one of the chicks had trouble climbing back to the tree. They even kindly lifted her up there, but she had trouble staying there as if she couldn’t keep her balance.

An ornitologist had ringed the chicks a few days earlier and had found out that the wing feathers of this particular kid had not grown at all. When she once again fell from the tree, the photographers called the ornitologist. I happened to be there when he arrived half an hour later with his cooler bag. He was a nice guy, a professor, with whom I’ve talked many times since.

He took her to the nearby Korkeasaari Zoo Wildlife Hospital, where they treated her for three months. She fared well, learned to eat living food, in fact there was nothing wrong with her – except that her wing weathers never grew, not a bit. That meant she was and would remain flightless. Since they couldn’t release her to the wild in that state, they put her to death in the summer and did an autopsy on her. They estimated the source of her condition was a genetic disorder.

I took the picture under her home tree just before the ornitologist put her in the cooler bag and took her away.

(“Tawny” means the reddish brown color of the fox, the professor told me.)