Colorado Springs Firefighters Give Flightless Great Horned Owlets A Lift To Safety
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (CBS4) - Usually when Colorado Parks and Wildlife calls firefighters, they need help getting a bear out of a tree. This week in Colorado Springs, officers needed help getting a pair of great horned owlets back into a tree.
The CPW got a call about the baby birds on the ground. When officers arrived on Thursday, they realized they needed some help getting them up into the tree.
Their call brought firefighters from Colorado Springs Fire Station 9. Firefighters Eli Neshiem and Chris Jones did the final rescue.
The ladder engine lifted them up to the nest but still had to stretch out all the way to get the owlets back in the nest.
The mother owl flew away from the nest when the humans arrived but she was close by keeping an eye on the rescue.
Those owlets are about 15 days old meaning the adventurous pair need to stay put.
"Hopefully they'll stay in there for another 30-35 days," explained Corey Adler with CPW. "Then they'll have enough flight feathers and some muscles, more muscles so they can do some flights. They'll be able to fly away from the nest and go other places and mom will still follow them for while."
Adler said in this case the people who found the owlets did exactly right thing by calling CPW. That gave officers the chance to just return the birds to their nest and not disrupt their growth.
In other cases, they can make the decision to safely take birds in distress to the Raptor Center in Pueblo so they can be cared for and safely released back into the wild.
