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If you find an injured owl:

Note your exact location so the owl can be released back where it came from. Contact a licensed wildlife rehabilitation specialist to get correct advice and immediate assistance.

Minimize stress for the owl. If you can catch it, toss a towel or sweater over it and get it in a cardboard box or pet carrier. It should have room to be comfortable but not so much it can panic and injure itself. If you can’t catch it, keep people and animals away until help can come.

Do not give food or water! If you feed them the wrong thing or give them water improperly, you can accidentally kill them. It can also cause problems if they require anesthesia once help arrives, complicating procedures and costing valuable time.

If it is a baby owl, and it looks safe and uninjured, leave it be. Time on the ground is part of their growing up. They can fly to some extent and climb trees. If animals or people are nearby, put it up on a branch so it’s safe. If it’s injured, follow the above advice.

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Owl Motherhood is Intense. Give Her the Respect She Deserves! (lemmy.world)

submitted 13 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago) by anon6789@lemmy.world to c/superbowl@lemmy.world

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From Jason Fowler

This is why you leave owls alone when they are on eggs. People think the owl isn't stressed standing under her talking loudly with other people.

I haven't left this branch in 19 days.

It's 4°F. The wind is 25 mph. The wind chill is -15°F. (That's -15C, 40 kmh, and -26C respectively.)

I am a Great Horned Owl, and I am incubating three eggs that cannot survive one hour without my body heat.

- I cannot leave to hunt. My mate brings me food, when he can find it.

- I've lost 15% of my body weight since I started sitting.

-My feathers are caked with ice. I cannot preen.

- I rotate my eggs every 30 minutes, even at 3 AM.

- I have 9 more days of this before they hatch.

Beneath me, three heartbeats depend on my stillness. If I leave for 20 minutes, they die. If I shift wrong, they freeze on one side. If a predator comes, I must fight without abandoning the nest.

Motherhood is not a feeling. It is a 28-day siege.

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[–] anon6789@lemmy.world 8 points 11 hours ago

If I shift wrong, they freeze on one side.

Are you referring to this?

Scientists believe this ensures even and steady temperature, maintaining the internal shell membrane, and also proper distribution of nutrients.

If you've ever seen a bird nudge its eggs with its beak, you may have wondered what all the fuss is about. Turns out, the behavior is a critical part of incubation, and each species may have its own egg-turning recipe to hatch a healthy chick, a new study shows.

Scientists believe that most birds rotate their eggs to ensure that the embryo gets enough albumen—the mixture of water and protein that makes up the "egg white" part of an embryo and provides nutrients to the developing chick. Too little albumen leads to an underdeveloped and usually sickly chick, research on domesticated birds shows. Few studies have investigated egg turning in wild birds, in no small part because the adults are, naturally, in the way.

To get an unprecedented look at what's happening in the nest, Shaffer tricked seabirds into treating plastic eggs with sensors hidden inside as the real thing. Researchers have previously slipped artificial eggs outfitted with sensors into the nests of unsuspecting birds, but Shaffer's team is the first to capture "a full turning" of an egg. That's because the loggers record 3D orientation (thanks to a combination of three-axis accelerometers and magnetometers), as well as temperature.

Short Article Here

Nesting and hatching are much more complex and problematic than most media portrays them. I did a post on hatching before, and it takes about 24 hours from when the shell pips (first crack through to the outside) to when the bird is free from the shell. That's a lot of physical exertion to expect of a newborn! (Here's a second hatching post I found.)