The baby owl that Bart Richwalski picked up in the fall was unlike anything the wildlife rehabilitator had seen. The bird had become trapped in a truck-mounted concrete mixer, leaving hardened concrete caked across the owl’s small body, from his face to his tail feathers.
“Oh, boy,” Richwalski recalled thinking. “What are we going to do with this owl?”
Richwalski took the owl to the Utah wildlife sanctuary where he works. He and other caregivers spent days meticulously removing the concrete with forceps, toothbrushes and dish soap.
But there was a problem that stopped rescuers from returning the owl to the wild: His right wing made a whooshing sound when he flew.
Great horned owls’ feathers allow them to fly silently and sneak up on prey, but the concrete frayed about a dozen feathers on the owl’s right wing. The owl’s caregivers hoped he would molt, a process in which owls shed their feathers for new ones. But when the owl didn’t this spring, his caregivers brainstormed other ways to heal him.
They took training courses to learn a meticulous procedure called imping, in which broken feathers are replaced with healthy, donated feathers from another owl. The procedure needs to be executed perfectly: Each new feather has to be precisely the same length, in the same place and ideally the same color as the damaged feathers.
Richwalski and other caregivers from Best Friends Animal Society replaced 11 of the owl’s brown and gray feathers during the roughly 90-minute imping procedure this month. Then they took the owl to an aviary and listened to him fly, tracking the sound with a noise meter.
When the owl flew silently, Richwalski said he felt like he could breathe for the first time in hours.
“I think my heart started beating again,” Richwalski told The Washington Post.
As the owl left the refuge later that day, Richwalski reflected on the bird’s journey.
It was late October when Richwalski received a call from a state wildlife official about an owl that slipped into a white concrete mixer at a resort in Ivins, Utah. Construction workers discovered the owl when he fell out alongside concrete as they built a two-story underground parking garage.
The owl probably entered the mixer by flying into a connected pipe that releases concrete, said Joseph Platt, the resort’s environmental affairs director. Owls commonly nest on cliffs and black lava fields around the resort, Platt said.
Construction workers rinsed the bird to remove some of the concrete, but parts of the adhesive remained on his feathers.
Richwalski drove about 80 miles west to pick up the owl before turning around to the Best Friends Animal Society’s sanctuary in Kanab, Utah. He and other caregivers worked quickly to remove dried concrete from the owl’s face, worrying the bird would ingest the adhesive. Then they turned to the owl’s chest and right wing, where a bulk of the concrete sat.
The owl weighed nearly two pounds and seemed a bit unsure about how to pull food apart, Richwalski said, signaling he was probably born near the start of 2025.
Great horned owlets are born in the late winter and early spring but often don’t leave their families until the fall, said Marcie Logsdon, an associate professor at Washington State University’s school of veterinary medicine.
Because of the owl’s frayed feathers, he stayed in an enclosure at the sanctuary while his caregivers hoped he would molt. They hid frozen rodents and quails under leaves and on perches and stumps for the owl to forage.
In March, when the owl had still not molted, Richwalski and other caregivers decided on the imping procedure. A wildlife rescue in Sandy, Utah, donated feathers from a great horned owl that had died.
On the morning of May 1, Richwalski and other rehabilitators painstakingly cut each donated feather to the lengths of the damaged feathers and placed them in the exact positions of the old feathers before gluing them on. They replaced 10 primary feathers on the outside of the right wing and a secondary feather on the inner wing.
“It was nerve-racking, to say the least, at the very beginning,” said Richwalski, 41. “And I think by the third, fourth feather, we were really getting into the groove.”
But he was still nervous he would hear the owl’s wing flapping in the aviary. He brought a portable meter that picks up sound starting at 30 decibels — similar to a soft whisper — that he hoped wouldn’t register noise from the owl’s flight. It didn’t.
A few hours later, a staff member opened the aviary’s roughly 20-foot-tall roof. After a few minutes, the owl flew straight up and out of the aviary. He headed southwest to a forest, where he landed on a tree.
Richwalski said he thinks about the owl every day but is happy he’s in his natural habitat, where he’s expected to eventually molt his grafted feathers and grow new ones.
“He spent, so far, half his life here in captivity, unfortunately,” Richwalski said. “So I hope the rest of his life is truly wild.”
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