A few weeks ago, I was invited to a local home to spend some time with a new family of Great Horned Owls in the neighborhood. They had nested nearby, and with the kids now having learned to fly, all (adults and two owlets) had been spending time in the yard in the early stages of hunting lessons. With my busy schedule, it took a couple of days after the invitation to make it over, but I arrived to quite a surprise.

In the interim day, an interesting event occurred – a third, smaller baby showed up on Monday. It is unknown as to whether this one was part of the original brood, late in leaving the nest, or possibly somehow abandoned or had lost its own parents, and was attempting to make itself accepted by this family.

I don’t hold enough knowledge of owl behavior to understand which might be the more viable answer, but I don’t believe birds in general “adopt” lost or abandoned young as many mammals do. On the contrary, some birds even sacrifice their own “runts” so they can provide more food for the more dominant chicks. My instincts tell me it is the former case: a runt of the brood.

Whichever the case, this little one did its best to fit in with the family, spending all of Monday with the other little ones, hopping about the yard inspecting vole holes and flying about the lower branches and rock outcroppings under the eyes of the watchful parents high in the trees. According to the homeowner, this activity carried on into the evening, and then suddenly the adults gathered up the original pair of littles and all four took wing and headed off into the forest, leaving this smallest one among the pines and rocks in the yard.

When I arrived yesterday evening it was still alone and was once again flitting about the low branches and rock outcroppings, taking in its new world and occasionally scanning the ground as though in search of possible food. Owlets, like most raptor young, are not adept at hunting, and in the case of Great Horned Owls, will spend much of their first summer being fed by the parents. Even after separation, it takes some time before they become proficient in the act. They often begin practicing in the nest, pouncing on sticks and other nest remnants, but a moving target is quite a different and challenging quarry.

By all appearances, the chick looked quite healthy and seemed to have worked out most of the kinks of flight. That said, time spent in lower branches and on the ground as babies learn to hunt can leave them open to attack from all manner of predators, especially if they are still slow to launch into flight.

Along with predation, they also face the potential of starvation if they are unable to capture prey. With the yard it chose as home and training grounds being rife with an abundant vole population, there is hope it will figure things out on its own, but that hope may be slim.

As the homeowner and I were talking, a large bull moose well known to the neighborhood made his way into the yard and bedded down near where the owlet was perched in low branches.

An all-to-easy slip into anthropomorphism: the almost fairytale-like atmosphere among the pines, aspens, and wild raspberry bushes, with the setting and characters seeming to have the trappings of an epic children’s story in the making. Before leaving, I implored the moose to keep watch over the little one, and to show it the ways of the forest in the best way it could convey from his permanent place on the ground as a grazer and not a hunter.

An unlikely pair of spirits of the forest: the elder guiding the younger in the ways of wisdom and life in the wild; an age-old allegory unfolding anew.

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