Fun fact: great horned owls can exert 500 psi of pressure with their feet and talons.
Fun fact 2: owls know jiu jitsu.
So we stepped out on the deck after a howl-in with the coyotes and were fascinated by the bird flapping around in the chicken yard. We thought it was the "challenged" Freckles who had forgotten how to get back into the coop. So we went down to assist and discovered a great horned owl sitting on Pete's tree stump. Mom grabbed the rooster-poker and tried to drive him out the gate, but he just let her poke at him. We thought he was exhausted, poor thing, and mom thought that she could just pin his wings down and shoo him out the door (in her defense, it was the middle of the night). That's when he pulled the jiu jitsu move.
He flipped onto his back and had a grip on mom's hand, puncturing and exerting that 500 psi on her hand. They were in a standoff, and mom finally convinced him to stop squeezing and driving the talons through her hand and she promised not to let the crazy red dog barking up a storm eat him. She was an owl whisperer. Eventually he let her pull those talons out of her hand and they went to their respective corners of the ring and watched each other for about ten minutes. Big yellow eyes, unblinking on Mr. Owl. Mom finally nudged him towards the door and he figured the rest out himself.
I should note that no chickens were harmed in the commission of this farce: they were all sleeping peacefully (chicken coma) in their roost. I suspect he flew in after a mouse and then couldn't figure out how to get out again.
A couple of hours later mom woke up with excruciating pain in her middle finger, bruises on her hand, swelling and no way to use her left hand at all. So another trip to urgent care this morning for mom. She got to be the most interesting story of the day!
No broken bones, just soft tissue damage, swelling and a couple of punctures, bruises and scratches. One-handed keyboarding for awhile. And penicillin horse pills, 14 of them.
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