From Middle Tennessee Raptor Center
I'm behind on this post but better late than never.
On April 25th this sweet little screech owl was brought to us after being hit by a car. All I have got to say is this is one tough cookie!
Screech owls are not very hearty birds of prey. Their size does not work in their favor when it comes to car strikes. This one got very lucky.
On the night he arrived I did not expect him to make it through us giving him fluids and pain medications. His eye was swollen shut and at that point we didn't even know if he still had one there. He could not stand and had to be propped up with towels so he didn't fall over.
For several days he just held his head down and was so pitiful. We just kept giving him time, anti-inflammatories, and offering little bits of food. I came to check on him one morning and he was standing up.
He is continuing to heal and was just upgraded to a larger enclosure. He has no residual effects from his head trauma and he will be able to be released back to the wild soon.
The main photo is from the day of the post, after the recovery.
He is!
So many injuries that don't seem that bad if they would happen to us can be fatal to an owl due to their compromises in anatomy. I avoid a good number of recovery stories due to this, since the outcome can turn for the worse so quickly. This little dude really beat the odds though!
That makes sense. Reminds me of that one scene in one of the star trek reboots where Spock gets injured but because of Vulcan anatomy, it's more serious than one would expect lol.
For some reason I've never really thought about how the severity of injuries would change for owls but they are a totally different animal so I definitely understand now how that would affect them.
Small owls like this one can have eyes that take up almost half of the volume of the skull, and they don't have nice dense bones or any padding most places because they traded all that for flight. That leaves birds, and owls in particular, very susceptible to injury.
This is why small birds can mob the predators without much fear of being attacked back. It is just too easy to get injured as a bird, and any needless fight can blind them, leave them unable to fly, or leave them too low on calories to have the energy to hunt their next meal.
Oh gotcha, that makes sense. Thanks!