Friday, April 23, 2010

Baby Owl Finds His Way Home


Last night a baby owl showed up in our back yard. It was obvious he had "flown the coop" a bit early and could not fly. Both parents watched as he hopped around, and by the time we went to bed, I did not have much confidence he would make it through the night (we have cats, foxes and other predators around here).

At 9am today, I looked out the window and was surprised to see the baby owl in our back yard. He was flapping around and seemed scared. Both parents were in the trees still watching him. I tried looking up some sort of bird or owl rescue to ask what to do to help the little guy because it seemed obvious he was going to get eaten...but I couldn't find anything online.

We went back out to check on him and he managed to start climbing a tree. He grabbed the tree with his claws, flapped his wings and literally walked up the tree. I ran back in to get the video camera again and as I was videoing the owl in the tree, I saw something else move. I zoomed in and saw another baby owl peeking out a hole in the tree. Our little guy found his way home!

I took the video camera to school today to show my students and we used it as an opportunity to learn a little about video editing. The second grade class named the owl Chubbykins, and so we put his name in the video. My wonderful junior high class, while making their own owl video, started playing around with my video camera and taped over the original video (which made me OH SO HAPPY when I found out tonight). Anyway, the only video footage this is left is what we did in the second grade class today, so the name Chubbykins is forever tied with the owl video. (Yes, I realize I could edit the video, but this copy is already degraded from the original and if I edit and re-render, the quality will be very poor).

So here is Chubbykin's story on video.

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