{"id":97212,"date":"2021-04-17T06:37:29","date_gmt":"2021-04-17T12:37:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=97212"},"modified":"2021-04-17T16:08:45","modified_gmt":"2021-04-17T22:08:45","slug":"an-evocative-souvenir","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2021\/04\/17\/an-evocative-souvenir\/","title":{"rendered":"An Evocative Souvenir"},"content":{"rendered":"

Guess what I found yesterday.<\/p>\n

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My slightly oversized garage also serves as my woodshop so you can imagine what a mess it becomes during and immediately after one of my ‘projects’. These days, with my bad back, those projects have become much less frequent so it had been far too long since the last time I’d cleaned my garage. Finally I couldn’t take the clutter any longer so for the last several days I’ve been slowly sprucing it up as best I could.<\/p>\n

Yesterday, in an old storage container I hadn’t opened in almost six years, I found a memento that was both sad and encouraging. I was surprised by how far the memories it sparked set me back on my heels.<\/p>\n

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It’s just an old piece of barbed wire that I’d completely forgotten I’d saved and it brought back memories that I found to be both traumatic and surprisingly uplifting.<\/p>\n

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Blog followers will remember the Barn Owl that Mia and I found hanging from barbed wire in Montana’s Centennial Valley in September of 2015. I’ve told this part of the story before so today I’ll keep my explanation of that day’s events as short as possible.<\/p>\n

We attempted to extract the strikingly beautiful owl from the wire “in situ” but ‘he’ was so effectively snagged by a single barb it was obviously impossible to get him off the wire without causing further damage to his left wing. So I tried another strategy. I happened to have a small pair of wire cutters in my pickup so I cut a 2′ section of the top wire out that included the attached owl and laid the terrified but relatively calm bird on the tailgate of my pickup as we tried to figure out our next step. I cut the 2′ section of the wire attached to the owl down to a more manageable size of about 7″ and that piece of wire was the ‘souvenir’ I found in my garage yesterday.<\/p>\n

We were in a remote area with no cell phone service but miraculously Bill West, manager of nearby Red Rock Lakes National Wildlife Refuge, drove up on the dirt road on his way to Dillon and helped me to safely get the 7″ piece of wire extracted from the owl’s wing. Then Bill drove off with the owl wrapped in his jacket and eventually made arrangements to have him transported to the Montana Raptor Conservation Center<\/a><\/span><\/span> (MRCC) in Bozeman about 200 miles northeast of us.<\/p>\n

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My next problem was related to having cut the wire. Cutting fence in cattle country is serious business because of the potential for accidents caused by loose cattle and the inconvenience and expense it causes for ranchers. Bill had promised to send some of his refuge crew to fix the fence but that would take some time so I patched the fence temporarily as best I could using materials and tools I had in my pickup.<\/p>\n

If you look carefully my patch can be seen at the top of the vertical piece of wire midway between the two posts. Mia tied yellow flags to the adjacent posts so Bill’s crew could easily find the part of the fence that needed to be repaired.<\/p>\n

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Here’s a closer look at my patch, made using a piece of rope I had in my pickup. It was a crude but effective temporary fix.<\/p>\n

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And here’s a closer look at my barbed wire memento. To this day there’s a fragment of owl feathers attached to the barb that snagged him. The lower barb on the coiled piece of wire is shorter than the other one because while the owl was still on the fence I cut the end of it off in a failed attempt to get the owl safely off the wire.<\/p>\n

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I couldn’t believe how evocative it was for me yesterday when I found this simple piece of wire. I must have stood there for ten minutes or more, leaning over my workbench with the piece of wire in my hand and thinking about what did happen and what could have happened.<\/p>\n

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Copyright Montana Raptor Conservation Center<\/em><\/p>\n

Thankfully the story had a happy ending. Exactly three weeks later MRCC volunteers drove the healed owl back to the Centennial Valley and released him near the area where Mia and I found him hung up on the fence. Karen West, Bill’s wife, had the distinct honor of opening the door to the transport container and setting him free.<\/p>\n

In the nearly six years since all this occurred I’ve thought about what happened many times of course. But having that physical piece of wire in my hand that included feathers from the owl brought it all back so clearly for me it was almost like watching a movie in my head.<\/p>\n

So I had to share with my blog followers. I think many of you will understand.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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Notes:<\/em><\/p>\n