How Athena became a House Owl

Back in 1997 I was an intrepid explorer. It was September, and I had a week left before heading back from my summer of research in Panama, so I hopped on a bus with a peripatetic botanist and all my audio recording equipment that made me resemble some kind of benign anarchist, and headed for La Fortuna, the cloud forest of Panama. Upon arrival, I found the walls of the research station seeping with black mold. I could barely breathe inside the building. The air was so wet that a constant mildew permeated everything, and gave me a continual headache. Our first night there, we learned to hypnotize bats.

Catching bats is not like catching birds. Neither like being held by larger beings that seem to want to eat them, but bats have an uncanny ability to tear you apart. To catch a bat, you must leave on a hike when the sun goes down, and raise mist nets high into the trees with a system of pulleys, reaching up into the canopy. The nets are the same as for birds, but when you bring them down, you had better be wearing your welding gloves, or you can kiss your fingers goodbye. And removing a squirming mammal from a mist net is an entirely different experience. But once you have these buggers in your hands, they become an entirely different beast, and very suggestive. At the end of the night, the last bats to make the net can be literally hung up as dawn comes an they slip back into their torpor of sleep. I do not know to this day if some hypnotic trick was used (I should look this up), but seeing those bats hanging upside down in a row under the eves was a sight to behold.

But this story is not about bats, it is about a very unfortunate mottled owl who came into contact with a most unforgiving barbed wire fence, and if you ever go to Panama, you will observe that the mottled owl looks very much like a screech owl.

We left Fortuna on horseback, the botanist, a Panamanian woman from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, some horsemen and myself, and headed for the town of New York. Now this particular New York did not in any way resemble its Northern neighbor, in fact, to call it a town would be unreasonably generous - it was really just a collection of 10 or so houses far from civilization. Not a valley, really, just a slopy meeting of steep hillsides. We packed in all our food in a large styrofoam cooler, which would play a significant role later in the story. The horses were needed to ford some torrid streams.

We spent several days there, I recording birds (somehow I thought I might compare House Wren calls of Western Panama with those of North America or some such nonsense), and my botanist friend dutifully collecting plant specimens heretofore unknown to science in black plastic bags. We stayed in a little hut by a spring, and ate up most of the food in the styrofoam cooler, which would later prove to be a good thing, not so much for us, but for the owl.

One the third morning, we packed out at an unreasonably early pre-dawn hour. It was several hours by horseback back to the Fortuna research station, and we were anxious to make the mid-morning bus (really a glorified van), so that we could make the six or seven hour journey back to Panama City and then Gamboa, where the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute Housed many of its scientists.

It was still dark as we hauled up one of the last hills toward Fortuna. On the left, a barbed wire fence skirted the trail, presumably for cattle. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw something alive on the fence. Alive and feathery and moving. I dismounted and walked up to it. Impossibly wrapped in one string of barbed wire was a terribly mangled wing, and attached to that wing, was a very frightened owl. It hissed at me when I approached. All my bleeding-heartstrings were being pulled at this moment. The poor thing must have been hunting away for mice in the field, without a care, when it collided with a unforeseen manmade object, namely, the fence. I took one look at the wing. The tissue had been deeply torn, and covered in blood. It was clear that without medical attention, this owl would never fly again.

What to do? As a bird lover, I couldn't leave a dying owl in a fence. I grabbed my towel out of my backpack and put it over the owl to calm her down. Then, gently, I pulled flesh from wire, little by little, until the entire wing was liberated. Grasping the entire owl-towel ensemble in both hands, I walked back to the horse and retrieved the styrofoam cooler, removing the few bits of lettuce and carrots still inside. It was big enough to comfortably house an owl, with room to turn around. I poked some holes in the top, and off we went.

Back at Fortuna, it became clear that the owl could not stay there. No one could care for it properly. I began to question the wisdom of taking on this unfortunate charge a week before leaving the country. I checked the Birds of Panama book - this was a Mottled Owl, widspread throughout Panama, so taking her to another elevation shouldn't be a huge shock. We hopped on the autobus to town, and then caught the midday bus for Panama City, the botanist with her seven bags of plants and me with a styrofoam cooler holding a live owl on my lap. It was 90 degrees out down at these lower elevations, with 90% humidity. Begin the long slog back to the big city. I had a soda cup with a straw full of water. Every now and then, I'd check the temperature in the cooler (nice and temperate in there!) and give the owl a sip of water through the straw. She was certainly thirsty. There I was, a bus full of Panamanians, and the blonde girl with the secret on her lap. I could have had a fer-de-lance in there, for all the other passengers knew, now that would have been exciting, but the owl was enough for me. I was worried about her, what if the wing became infected? What were her chances? What would she eat? Finally, we made it to Panama City, and then another 45 minutes or so through the Canal Area brought us home to Gamboa, where I cleaned the wounds as best I could with hydrogen peroxide, and dressed them with iodine. At least that is what I remember, although the cleaning was so difficult, what happened next is really a blur. I set the owl up in a wire cage with some water, covered it with a towel, left some water. I swore I heard hooting in the middle of the night.

In the morning I had a dilemma. What to do with the owl? Several of the resident scientists had raised orphaned owls over the years, but I was leaving. Fortunately, there was a small wildlife rehab zoo just down the road. I don't know how I got so lucky, this was in the middle of nowhere, after all. The veterinarian agreed to take her in, on the condition that I buy her several months' supply of canned cat food. They didn't have the funds to buy all that food. I remember my trip to the grocery store; canned cat food is not a hot sale item in Panama City, so it took a bit of hunting before I filled the cart with can after can of the premium-priced stuff. I hoped she would eat it. Must taste a little limpid after fresh mouse for every meal since chickhood. I delivered the food, and that was that, the owl was no longer my responsibility.

I headed home the next week, and wondered what became of the owl on the fence. About a month later I got an email from a Panamanian colleague informing me that the owl had been named "Atenas" which is Spanish for Athena, and once her wing had healed and she could "fly with a limp," the botanist had taken her into her apartment in Panama City. She became a teaching owl, traveling to schools so children could learn all about owls and raptors, and she hooted through the night in the old brick building, flying around the room in search of mice.

Athena never returned to the cloud forest, never hunted in the wild again, but as an environmental eductor, she became quite famous.

And that is the story of how Athena became a house owl.

The photos I took are of a trogon and a red-eyed tree frog in Panama.