Found this little Screech owl yesterday. Sometimes they're easy to see...... And sometimes they're not !!!!!!!
Very nice - had one of these in my house once...came in through the fireplace and flew around for about 20 minutes as we tried to direct him out the front door....
That's amazing.The exact same thing happened to me a couple years ago. In fact, we had one that used to visit us regularly until the day it got stuck inside the chimney and died because we couldn't manage to take him out.Very sad.
We heard a noise coming from the chimney one evening, and when my wife looked inside she could see an ear and an eye looking back at her through the partially opened damper, so she asked me to take a look - she thought it was a cat. I said a cat would be making a lot of noise, and when I looked at the eye I said I was pretty sure it was an owl. We called a buddy of mine who is a manager for our province's ministry of natural resources, and he said it was likely a screech owl, and we should dim the lights in the room, open up the damper in the fireplace as much as possible, turn the TV down and not make a lot of noise, and just wait. He said it would make it's way down into the fireplace, and it wasn't 20 minutes later and it was there, sitting on the grates for the wood. We closed the damper, gathered some large blankets, and I opened the door and tried to grab onto it, but he got away and flew around the house....I took this photo if him sitting on top of our old fridge with a crappy point and shoot film camera I had at the time...this is before digital cameras had any sort of quality... I did forget to turn off the ceiling fan, so he flew into that at one point and lost a couple of feathers. Oops! Eventually we had him flying around with the front door wide open, and between my wife and I we directed him out the font door by using the blankets to block his path. They look small, but his wings just barely made it through the front doorway... Kind of cool we had one in the house. After finding several other birds and a dead squirrel in the chimney, we finally had a new cap put on that block animals from getting down it. Cheers, Al
He's in the same spot a few weeks later and must have 1000s people coming to look at him (her?) daily. Some of which have driven several 100 of miles to see him. Simply amazing.