Well, I found this owl on the road. It looked like it had just been hit by a car, so I took it home and looked after it for a couple of days. This is a Mountain-Scops owl (Otus spilocephalus) and is endemic to Taiwan. If you have been anywhere near the mountains at night in Taiwan, you have probably heard this owl - it has a single pitch double whistle which repeats about every ten seconds, with each segment of the whistle lasting about half a second.
They are difficult to spot unless they have been run over, like this one was.
I released it back to the wild when it could fly again, and when I could see that it was eating. It had a bit of a wonky eye, possible from the accident, but that didn’t seem to put it off flying around my house and shitting on the sofa.
Great job taking care of it!
There was one that lived behind our neighborhood for years. I’d drive the back road home real slow at night and it was often in the road – sometimes in the middle – feasting on a run-over snake or other small roadkill. Beautiful animal, but it’s dependence on roadkill led to its demise. It was only a matter of time, really. It had needed to find hunting grounds away from traffic.
Glad yours made it. Hopefully it will have learned its lesson and stay away from roadkill.
Thanks MM.
Actually, I did take it to a shelter in Hualien but they said, or rather, we agreed that because it wasn’t too badly hurt it would be better to take it home and then release it where it had been found. It was found 100km south of Hualien, and as I was going back up that way it wasn’t too much trouble to look after it. It was stunned, but not really that badly injured.
