What a Hoot : Two Owl Chicks Are Rescued From a Rocket Tower Slated for Demolition

Rocketdyne technicians should be getting wise to fowl play on their Santa Susana grounds. For the second time in a month, great horned owls have created a hooo-ha of distractions in the rocket testing fields.

In the latest incident, Rocketdyne firefighter Dean Lidstrom scaled a 100-foot test stand to rescue two owl chicks Friday.

Lidstrom, dangling on an orange rappelling rope, hovered around the opening to the tower where he knew the nest to be. A dead mouse, presumably a snack left by one of the parent owls, lay atop the tower. Just inside, the two chicks, the object of the rescue, had grown much larger than expected.

“There’s a lot of white down with little bits of gray stripes,” Lidstrom shouted down to Jerry Thompson of the Raptor Rehabilitation and Release Program.

“Don’t worry about it. If they start snapping their beaks at you, it is just a threatening gesture,” Thompson yelled back, redundantly.

Thompson explained that the aggressiveness of owl chicks can be estimated by their age, which in turn can be determined by their feathers and coloring.

The chicks, Thompson estimated, are a month to six weeks old, instead of the three weeks Rocketdyne employees had guessed. A great horned owl reaches full size and maturity at 12 weeks, he explained.

“They are predators, sitting at the top of the food chain, so they’ve got to get out there and start hunting,” he said.

Lidstrom said the predators-in-training exhibited no threatening behavior as he lifted them from their nest and into his homemade aerial bird carrier. But by the time they were safely on the ground with throngs of reporters gathered around them, the clacking of their small beaks was clearly audible above the clicking shutters of the cameras.

“I guess they don’t like reporters,” one cameraman joked.

The nest was discovered about four weeks ago as technicians prepared the abandoned tower for demolition. That was shortly after a similar rescue operation had to be mounted to retrieve two owl eggs from another test tower, where the presence of the nest had forced the company to suspend rocket tests.

Those eggs, though, were cold by the time they were taken in, and after three weeks of incubation they still showed no signs of life.

The outlook for these nestlings, whom Thompson guesses to be a female and a male (the females have bigger feet), is much brighter. They will be placed temporarily into the protective custody of Raptor Rescue and Rehabilitation, which will get them acquainted with slightly older great horned owls. Eventually, they will be released in the wilds in Ventura County.

“These two have good-sized muscles,” Thompson said. “It is obvious their parents have taken good care of them.”

Great horned owls are among the predatory birds protected by state and federal law. It is illegal to harm them or possess the birds or any bird part, Thompson said.

Rocketdyne makes and tests rocket engines.