Animal lovers give injured owl second chance at life

Dennis MacKenzie could've kept driving and not given a hoot.

He was already running late for his son's basketball game in Crapaud, P.E.I.

But when MacKenzie spotted what appeared to be an injured owl on the side of the highway, he didn't hesitate to pull over.

This is a guy whose mother brought an injured seal pup back to their home for a month when he was just a teenager..

So why wouldn't he stop to help an owl peeking out from the ditch?

"That would be my question," he said. "I think we all should be willing to stop and help anything that's in need somewhere."

The owl was in need, indeed.

When MacKenzie went back to check, it was trying to cross the road. He blocked traffic and allowed it to cross safely.

"He wasn't able to fly. Clearly his right wing was hurt," he said.

MacKenzie then drove about 10 minutes to Englewood School, dropped off the basketball players and circled back to see if he could find the owl.

Wearing only Crocs on his feet, he followed the tracks in the snow from its dragging wing and found it in a field.

His first call was to another animal lover, Candy Gallant, who he happened to meet at a function a week earlier.

Gallant, who runs P.E.I. Wildlife Rescue and Rehabilitation, arrived on scene and captured the owl after MacKenzie coaxed it down from a tree.

"I put him in the crate in my little car and brought him home and the rest is history. He's sitting happily on a perch, eating and waiting to go see a doctor."

She said she only had about six owls in 50 years rescuing injured animals.

But she's had nine this year. Some have just been thin, she said, or a baby that fell out of its nest.

"I think there's this really overpopulating now and so we're seeing a lot more of them and I think our weird weather may also be doing something to change where they're being found."

Gallant plans to take the owl to a veterinarian in Nova Scotia next week. If the bone is broken at the joint, it may have to be euthanized. Otherwise, she'll take it home for about two months of rehab.

But at least it has a fighting chance, and Gallant is now determined to recruit MacKenzie as one of her volunteers.

"It was one of the coolest rescues I've done, and I've done a lot of weird and cool rescues, but that one, he blew me out of the water. He's going to, he's going to stay in my world whether he wants to or not."

MacKenzie does have some experience. Back to that seal for a moment.

"When I was, I think, 13 or 14, my mother showed up with the baby seal at our house. Yeah, so it was injured or it was left by its parent or its mother abandoned on the beach," he said.

"We had it for a couple months and we're feeding it and swimming with it even so near the end the vet college agreed to take the seal because for two months it survived."