Owls nursed back to health

Crack, crack, crack! Nora the eastern screech owl snaps her short, yellow beak, threatening her caretaker. But Suzanne Shoemaker doesn’t scare easily. With a gentle grip, her gloved hands hold the injured, feathery raptor that is about the size of a grapefruit. Shoemaker feeds her a bite-size morsel of a defrosted mouse. Nora gulps down the small pink chunk, then another. She starts snapping again when presented with the tail. She’s had enough.

The meal finished, Shoemaker returns Nora, who has an injured wing, to a dark, quiet crate. Without a peep, four other eastern screech owl patients wait nearby in their covered cages. She repeats the meal until all five birds have been fed. Soon Shoemaker won’t have to feed them by hand.

A raptor specialist and licensed wildlife rehabilitator, Shoemaker cares for injured raptors, or birds of prey, such as eagles, hawks, falcons and owls, at Owl Moon Raptor Center in Boyds. Just before Christmas, the first of the five screech owls arrived after someone found it with a broken wing on the patio of a restaurant in Rockville, Md. Shoemaker named the owl Dora.

“Getting five screech owls within the span of nine days is a fluke,” Shoemaker says. She thinks that maybe 2013 was a good breeding year for screech owls and that the population has spiked. These five were probably all hit by cars.

The day after Dora appeared, Diego transferred in from Second Chance Wildlife Center in Gaithersburg, Md., with an eye injury. The next day, Dec. 23, Pepe Le Pew arrived, also with an eye injury and smelling as if he had tangled with a skunk. Nora arrived on the 27th with a damaged nerve in her left wing. On December 28, the screech owls were briefly joined in their quiet refuge by an injured bald eagle that Shoemaker rescued from a yard in Montgomery County. The fifth screech owl, Angora, arrived December 29 with a concussion, or brain trauma.

Shoemaker’s goal is to nurse them back to health and prepare them for release into the wild, if possible. Their prospects are “fair to good,” she says.

Different needs

Shoemaker cares for each patient differently, depending on its condition, with help from veterinarians and other wildlife specialists.

She examines the patients, stabilizes them (this could include giving fluids for dehydration, wrapping an injured wing or giving medicine to help with pain, infection or swelling) and creates treatment plans to get the birds fit and ready to hunt and survive in the wild.

Once a bird’s condition improves, but before it is released, she provides exercise and tests a bird’s ability to fly while it is attached to a long, light cord.

The best part of rehabilitation, she says, is getting to know each raptor as an individual.

“If you know one screech owl, that doesn’t mean you know them all,” she says. Nora is the feistiest. Diego and Pepe are more mild-mannered.

“They all fight a little bit,” she says, “because they don’t want to be handled and they definitely want to get out of here.”

But that’s a good thing — they’re wild animals, after all. After they’ve been in her care for a while, Shoemaker says the owls don’t threaten with their beaks or talons quite as much. They seem to understand she’s not going to eat them.

Owls’ soft, flexible feathers give them “silent flight” so they can sneak up on prey. Some owls have asymmetrical ears, meaning that one is higher on the head than the other. This enables them to hear up and down as well as left and right, so they can hunt better in the dark.

“To me it’s amazing how each animal is adapted to its lifestyle,” Shoemaker says. “It’s what makes each one special and why we need to take care of them.”