There are dangers with banding owls and climbing to the nests, other than the obvious ones.

You know, you can always fall 60 feet and break your neck, but you know.

I'm thinking of the one time I was hospitalized when I was bitten by an owlet and it required a couple of stitches and ever since that time I started to handle them a little bit differently.

I didn't want to repeat performance.

But I was banding a young owlet ready to go, so its weaponry, feet and beak, were already well developed.

And in banding you kind of cradle them under your armpit and extend the legs away from the body because you really have to be careful with the feet.

So I was banding and the owl quickly turned her head and bit a chunk out of my left breast and the shirt was laden with blood and I was a little nervous, but I continued banding the bird and got it back in the nest, then went to the hospital.

Now that was the next trauma.

Explaining to the emergency room people how this chunk came out of my left appendage and they kind of didn't believe it, but I got three stitches and all was well.

But then I had to explain the whole situation again when I had to go to a different doctor to get the stitches out.

I imagine both teams of doctors had stories to tell after that one.

So that was the only time I was hospitalized, but after that I paid attention to both beak and feet and addressed a different way in dealing with these birds when I was banding them.

Another time, oh what's another story? Another story is items of clothing in a nest.

This one nest that I visited and banded the birds and really had under surveillance was on the property of an elderly German couple.

They gave me permission to observe the birds and that.

They had a lot of small animals running around, so I did get some interesting pellet readings from them.

But the most interesting thing was when it came time to band the birds, I climbed up the tree.

I remember it was an old walnut tree with a red-tailed nest in it and the owls usurped it.

Climbed up the tree and as I'm climbing up I'm seeing something white in the nest and I'm wondering, well it's not the birds.

And when I get up to the nest, lo and behold, there is a pair of white underwear and a white bra.

And I knew it was the farmer's wife.

They kind of matched size-wise.

So I figured that the owls flew through the clothesline and got tangled up in these things, I think maybe twice.

I don't think both garments came at the same time.

But anyway, they were nicely lining the nest bra and underwear.

And then I thought, you know, I should say something to the farmer's wife, but we already had a language barrier and I didn't want to say, do you have a bra and underwear missing? She probably wouldn't have understood me anyway, but I often wondered what she thought what happened to those two items.

I left them in the nest because I didn't want to have to confront the situation.

But that was kind of a funny happening.

But I had lots of stories with these birds, mainly because you never know what they're going to do and what they're going to bring to the nest.

I found it interesting that with the bra and underwear in the nest, horned owls do not build a nest.

Why would they bring something to it? And I think it was probably just an accident, the woman hung clothes out on a clothesline, I think the owl was flying, got tangled up in something and ended up taking it to the nest.

So that was kind of a funny story.