Norco Elementary rallies around Great Horned owl to find help
Norco Elementary School recently had a special visit from a feathered friend — and lended him a lift.
Longtime school custodians Ryan Duhe and Kevin Cicet were able to help an injured owl discovered on campus in mid-January.
Duhe said he was going through his usual early morning routine when he noticed something peculiar.
“There was the owl, just sitting right there,” he recalled. “I unlocked the school and there he was sitting on the little rail, not moving, not doing anything. I was gonna leave him be.
“But when I passed back around, you could see the way his wing was and that he was struggling a little bit.”Duhe said the owl’s wing was “kicked back to the side” and that the bird was rendered unable to fly.
“The night before was a big storm, and I wasn’t sure if he’d flown into the window or something,” Duhe said. “This was about a half hour to an hour before anyone showed up. Kevin came in, then a few teachers. I tried to hide him so that nobody scared him or anything like that.”
But there was no real way to hide the rather large owl, and soon the bird became something of a spectacle, walking around in the area just outside a large window by a school entrance way.
“They just sat there and watched him,” Duhe said.
But the owl was injured, nonetheless, and needed help. Duhe and Cicet attempted to provide that, but they did not find the answers they were looking for upon their first two calls.
“We called a couple different places and they said they could euthanize him for us,” Duhe said. “That wasn’t what we wanted. We stopped in (elsewhere) and we got the same conclusion, to put him in the truck and they’d take care of him for us.”
Finally, they called Audubon Zoo and made some headway.
“We called at 10, and they called us back about 10:04,” Duhe said. “They told us, ‘yeah, bring him here and we’ll fix him up and see what we can do with him.”
Cicet was able to corral the owl and place him in a paper box. The two took off for the zoo, where they said two nurses were awaiting their arrival.
“They said when he could fly on his own, they’d release him,” Cicet said.
Duhe said when the river tide was high, a number of different animals made appearances near the school.
“We were having coyotes, raccoons, possums, anything you could imagine,” he said.
The two men said they were each glad to help the owl, but that they did not officially name their injured visitor. Cicet had a suggestion nonetheless.
“We’ve got Eddie the Eagle here,” Cicet said, alluding to Norco Elementary’s mascot. “Maybe we can call him Eddie the Owl.”
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