Andrew Shapiro
Andrew Shapiro was born in New York City, spent much of his life there and considers himself a city guy. He slept soundly through late-night car horns, but now gets a bit irked when awakened by the owl hoots coming from Vilas Park, which borders the house he and his family moved into in 2019.
So even he’s a bit surprised that he spent most of one weekend watching over a young owl that showed up on his back deck, at times staring curiously inside. “You know I’ve never been interested in bird watching,” says Shapiro. “And then I spent 48 hours…consumed with this bird. It is this adorable, beautiful wild animal. With the glass between us, we are inches from it. So it was fascinating. And I came to care about its well-being.”
“Ollie,” so named by Shapiro’s 10-year-old-daughter Lily, is a young great horned owl that has left the nest but is not yet ready to fly; technically, he's a “branchling owl.” Great horned owls usually begin flying when they are 7 to 8 weeks old, according to the Owl Research Institute.
Shapiro says he, Lily, and his wife, Pat Setji, were getting ready to watch a movie around 7 p.m. on April 19 when they heard a strange tapping noise. He looked out to the backyard deck to find Ollie peering through the glass. Shapiro called his family over, snapped some photos and looked up the bird on the internet. Worried the owl might get hurt, Shapiro contacted the Dane County Humane Society for advice, but it was closed.
The three then huddled in the living room to watch Ollie through sliding glass doors. The movie was forgotten.
“We just left him alone,” says Shapiro. “It was quickly getting darker. We could see that there was a parent in the trees. We wondered if it was going to feed the baby or help bring the baby away. When it got darker, Ollie hopped up on to our deck railing. The parent swooped in, joined him on the railing and fed him. We were just transfixed.”
The adult owl took off after the feeding and Ollie hopped back down off the railing. “It got really dark but we didn’t want to turn the lights on and startle him. We darkened the house and could see he was still there.” The family then went to bed.
Shapiro woke at 5:30 a.m. and headed downstairs to look for Ollie.
“He had tucked himself into the corner close to our sliding doors. So I sat on the edge of the couch and I sat there for 3 ½ hours just watching,” says Shapiro, noting the bird would come to the window, and hop up on the deck chairs. At one point, the owl launched itself from the top of the chair and tried to grab on to the screen door. “Then boom, he falls off,” says Shapiro.
At 9 a.m. Shapiro received a call back from Emily Temte, a staffer at the humane society’s wildlife center. He says she was extremely helpful and he spoke to her about six times over the weekend. She advised him to look for owl pellets at the base of nearby trees to try to determine where Ollie’s parents lived. “I Googled it,” says Shapiro of pellets, which are the undigested parts of food that birds sometimes regurgitate. “I didn’t have a lot of experience with it in Manhattan,” he says dryly. Shapiro snapped some photos, but the folks at the wildlife center did not think it likely that the owls would be roosting in those trees.
Temte then sent Shapiro a PDF on how to handle injured raptors and advised that he remove Ollie from the deck, put him on the lawn and see where he might go.
Shapiro got a cardboard box from a neighbor, some gloves and went outside by the owl at a “close, but respectable distance.” He could see the owl was getting nervous, but was able to corner him and gently put him in the box. When Shapiro lifted the lid on the box, Ollie came out, sat on the lawn for a while and looked around. Shapiro determined he should give Ollie some space and went back to the house.
Andrew Shapiro
But Shapiro did not stop watching. He saw that Ollie was starting to walk away from the backyard, through the woods and toward the bike path that runs alongside Vilas Park. Concerned, Shapiro followed from a distance. Ollie spotted Shapiro, changed course, and headed back to the woods. Then he hopped up on the back deck of a neighbor, three houses down from Shapiro’s house. What would any concerned owl-watcher do at that point? Go to the front of the house and ring the doorbell, of course. “I wanted to let them know that they had this branchling owl that just hopped up onto their deck and didn’t know how to get down,” says Shapiro.
Now feeling relatively experienced, Shapiro offered to remove Ollie from the deck at some point. The neighbors called just a few minutes later. Before he went over, he called the wildlife center again. “What would you like me to do with him?” he asked.
This time, Temte suggested he put Ollie back on his own deck. “He was okay, but not as calm as he was before,” says Shapiro, who then thought it was best to leave him alone. A bit later, Lily checked on Ollie and couldn’t see him. She found him lying on his back among some chicken wire in the now fallow vegetable garden. This was “operation number 3,” says Shapiro, who removed Ollie from the garden before he could get caught up in the wire.
Ollie started walking toward the bike path again, and this time a neighbor joined in to shepherd him away from potential danger. Just before 7 p.m. on Sunday, a neighbor called Shapiro with an Ollie spotting. Later that evening, Shapiro found him sitting in a tree. The next morning he spotted Ollie in a neighbor’s yard before the owlet climbed up a tree with his beak and talons. The owl stayed there all day.
As the work week began, Shapiro continued to monitor Ollie on breaks. Other neighbors did the same. He reports Ollie spent part of a day underneath a neighbor’s deck and also hung out in a tree directly behind Shapiro’s shed for a couple of days. Ollie’s parents remain in the area, feeding and watching over Ollie as well.
On April 27, it took him 45 minutes but, with binoculars in hand, Shapiro finally found Ollie nestled against a pine tree. It was now just about a week after Ollie first hopped up on Shapiro’s deck. His wife jokes that he is obsessed, but he says it’s more like he’s a surrogate father.
“I’m invested,” he acknowledges. “I feel a connection to it and I hope it’s okay.”
