WaPo Article

I encourage you to check out the full article, it has lots more of what they did to treat the owl and will give you a good idea of what rehabbers do to get an owl back out into the wild again. There’s also a video of the bird’s successful release to a safer place.

I forget if WaPo has a paywall, so let me know if you can’t see it and we’ll work around that. Otherwise, here’s a tl;Dr for you.

It was the morning of Friday the 13th, and staff were tending the grounds of the National Gallery of Art Sculpture Garden when they spotted something amiss: feathers sticking out of the blue bristles of the gigantic typewriter eraser.

As they stepped in for a closer look, they realized a barred owl was stuck in the brush of “Typewriter Eraser, Scale X” — the garden’s six-meter-tall steel-and-fiberglass sculpture of the once-common office relic.

The bird was still. But as the gardeners approached, it turned its head and blinked.

“This is the first instance that we are aware of regarding wildlife getting caught in a sculpture,” Brett McNish, the garden’s supervisory horticulturist, wrote in an email. “Occasionally, we see hawks momentarily perched on other taller sculptures in the garden, but never on Eraser. This is the first Owl seen in the garden.”

“Our goal is, of course, to preserve and maintain the sculptures and plantings, while peacefully coexisting with the wildlife in the Garden,” he said.

But then came Friday the 13th and the extraordinary owl in the eraser. It was unclear how the owl got into its predicament, but staff sprang into action. “It clearly needed help,” McNish said.

“It was extremely lethargic, and it looked really sad,” said Jim Monsma, City Wildlife’s executive director. “An owl during the day should not just be lying there in a box. It should be trying to fly away. It looked like it had just given up: ‘This is all too much. I’m throwing in the towel.’”

Tri-State Bird Rescue normally will return an adult bird of prey to the area where it was found, but it avoids transporting younger raptors because they can injure their wings in the carrier. Besides, as juvenile birds of prey become adults, they often have to find territory away from where they were raised anyway, Smith said.

And so, on Monday, staff went to retrieve the owl from its enclosure.

Then, they released it from the grounds of the rescue center — surrounded not by art but by nature and forests, bursting with colors from the turning leaves of autumn.