Laura Erickson's For the Birds

In April, I found myself the caretaker of a little screech owl I named Archimedes. He had been sent to a rehab center near Cleveland as a baby, but became imprinted and now isn’t releasable­ that’s how he became licensed as an education bird. My state and federal permits allow me to keep him to use for education, but so far, the one getting the education seems to be me.

Archimedes eats mice. I couldn’t bear to feed him live ones, so I get frozen ones from various sources. My main supply comes from Marge Gibson, a wonderful bird rehabber in Wisconsin. She gave me a package of 90 frozen white mice, but these seem to have been recycled from some research project, because they are all opened up, livers exposed. Archimedes eats them, but not until he’s really hungry. The Lake Superior Zoo and some kind KUMD listeners have provided me with more natural fare–mice they’ve caught in snap traps–and my mother-in-law just gave me 11 field mice that she caught in 10 days. One morning she found two mice in the same trap who had apparently been feeding together when the trap was snapped.

These poor little mice look rather sad and dear to me, but to Archimedes they look like food. I’ve always read, and observed with other owls I’ve cared for, that these nocturnal predators swallow their mice whole. But Archimedes prefers tearing them apart, hawk-fashion, which is his only unappealing habit.

When he’s not chowing down, he’s very pleasant company. I don’t have the heart to cage him, so he’s free to fly wherever he likes in my home office. I covered the tops of all my book shelves with Astroturf, an excellent surface for keeping captive birds from developing bumblefoot and other nasty foot problems, and it’s easy to rinse off. He also perches on my cuckoo clock and on an old duck decoy on one of the shelves, so I have to keep up with cleaning and dusting more than ever. I have a Wood Duck box for him, and he spent a lot of time in it when he first came, but now that he feels more comfortable here, he prefers to be out in the open just about all the time. One of his favorite perches is atop my gerbil cage. I would have thought that Digger and Sparky would be terrified of the little predator sitting above them, but they don’t seem to mind at all. Sometimes a rodent-level IQ is a blissful thing to have.

Owls and hawks may both be raptors, hunting for pretty much the same prey with the same fancy footwear, but they’re totally different in more than just their sleep patterns. Archimedes, like all the owls I’ve handled, is laid back, gentle-natured, and quietly observant. Hawks are much more high-strung, feisty, and domineering. When Archimedes looks into my eyes, he seems rather gentle and sweet, but some people who visit are unnerved by his stare. This seems to mirror the opposite takes different human cultures have about owls, as either benevolent spirits of the night, or horrific deliverers of death. Either is shy of the truth. Owls are precisely and uncompromisingly, simply and absolutely, nothing more or less than owls. I look into Archimedes’ mesmerizing eyes trying to understand him, from both a scientific and a poetic viewpoint, but between us he’s the only one who knows the truth, and, at least so far, he’ s not talking.