If an owl showed up in your yard would you think:

1.  it’s a sign that our home is blessed with wisdom
2.  it’s a sign that our home is cursed with disease or death
3.  it’s a sign that our home is infested with mice enough to feed the owl?

Growing up in Europe or N. America we associate the owl with wisdom.  Just look at the wise counsel given by owls in the Disney movies alone:  Sleeping Beauty, Winnie the Pooh, Fox and the Hound, Sword and the Stone, and Bambi to name a few. 

However on this continent, owls are traditionally seen as a bad omen and are cause for fear.  An owl perched on your gate or making its home in your attic is believed to be an indication that someone in your home will soon fall sick and may even die. 

In years past, while living in Central African Republic, we had owls in the attic.  They made a lot of noise over our heads every night causing no illness or death, just lack of a solid night of sleep.  Eventually Ron plugged up all the holes from the attic to the outside and thwarted further entry to any owls. 

Owls have provided our kids with hours of entertainment — when we found a stash of owl pellets in an unused building near that home in Central African Republic a few years back.  They loved cutting open the pellets and identifying tiny bones, skulls etc of the eaten prey.

A few weeks ago when Ron went over to the Wycliffe Center to pick up our van from the repair shop (that’s a subject for another post someday), he found an owl on the ground under a tree.  It must have fallen out of the tree in one of the last storms of rainy season the night before.  So Ron picked it up and brought it home.  One eye was damaged, but it did turn its head to watch a person pass by.

Having no knowledge of the care and feeding of wild owls, we wrote to our missionary vet friend, and turned to the internet.  After doing everything wrong at first, we learned not to try to give it water, not to handle it much as the stimulation may be too stressful.  Finally Ron took the bird out to RFIS in a cage, covered in a towel to keep it warm.  At least there it was out of the noise of the city.

Sadly, the owl did not survive, but he was kept comfortable in the final days of his life.  And now he has the priviledge of donating himself to the Advanced Placement Biology Class for study.  I mean, the owl doesn’t get to study but will be studied.  And in this case the only death he came to announce was his own.