With little fanfare and some encouragement from a small group gathered at Kathy and Al Renaud’s Coldstream home on Sunday afternoon, March 28, Henry the Owl flew again.
As soon as the cage with the rehabilitated owl opened shortly after 3 p.m., Henry flapped his brown wings and approached Lumby with a strong tail wind.
This is a long way from the last time the Morning Star told you about Henry.
On Thursday March 4th, the Renauds found the owl at the base of one of their trees. After several phone calls, Kathy Renaud was put in contact with the South Okanagan Raptor Rehab Center (SORCO) in Oliver and drove the bird south, where a volunteer from the center picked the owl up.
A day later, in a conversation with employees, Renaud was told that Henry was fighting for his life after showing signs of secondary poisoning.
“In other words, she was eating a poisoned rodent,” said Renaud.
When Henry, a great horned owl, arrived at the center on February 27, he showed signs of poisoning, loss of vision in his left eye, clenched claws that were trembling uncontrollably. He could not eat by himself and was hand-fed daily for two weeks.
Henry was given an antidote to vitamin K-1 every six hours for the first seven days until signs of improvement appeared, including the return of eyesight and the use of claws. Vitamin K-1 was continued every 12 hours for three weeks.
“The owl has made a full recovery,” SORCO said in a note sent to the Renauds on Sunday by a SORCO volunteer couple from West Kelowna. The center said Henry should be released in the location where he was rescued as he is an adult male Great Horned Owl, a lifelong bird of prey mate and this is mating season.
“We expect him to come back and find his partner,” said Kathy.
Renaud used social media to raise awareness of the original incident, and her post has received widespread response from residents since March 4, with more than 140 shares and 250 reactions.
One commenter shared an online petition sponsored by Rodenticide Free BC on the Action Network that collected around 1,900 signatures of its 5,000 goal to get the Environment Department to ban rodenticides as a pest control agent.
“Owls and other birds of prey are at particularly high risk of secondary poisoning because of their reliance on rodents as a food source,” the petition said, citing statistics from a 2009 study that found that 70 percent of owls were dead in BC Traces of had at least one rat poison in their system.
“The increasing poisoning of barn owls is particularly worrying as they are classified as threatened according to Appendix 3 of the Federal Law on Endangered Species.”
READ MORE: Coldstream Owl “Fights for Life” after ingesting rat poison
roger@vernonmorningstar.com
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Animal welfare
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