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Owl Whose Rescue Cost Lithia Woman Her Life Has Died

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By KEITH MORELLI

The Tampa Tribune

Published: June 20, 2008

TAMPA - The owl being treated at Florida Veterinary Specialists remained nameless, but that doesn't mean it didn't find its way into everyone's thoughts the past two weeks.

The bird was introduced to the staff at the Brandon facility on June 7 after a Lithia woman was fatally struck by a car while trying to rescue the bird.

Jean Hagen Pearce, 68, of 4016 Porter Road, died that night, but the owl lived. It is not known whether the vehicle Pearce was driving hit the owl or she found the bird in distress on Nichols Road just east of Keysville Road, said Ali Shreve, the veterinarian who has been treating the bird.

The owl had a broken right wing and an injured left eye, Shreve said Thursday. But it was something else that caused its death Tuesday.

"We kept the wing bandaged," she said. That wasn't the problem. It looked like the fractured bones would heal enough for the owl to fly again. The goal, she said, was to get the bird back into the wild.

The eye wasn't the problem either. "Owls, fortunately, hunt more by sound than by sight," she said.

So things were looking up for the bird, she said.

"He had been here 10 days, and he was improving," she said. "He was eating on his own. He was accepting food, and he even had started to hoot at night."

On Tuesday night, "after he had been hooting for two hours," employees found the bird dead in its cage, Shreve said. "I did a necropsy on him and found that his liver was almost nonfunctional," she said.

She said the condition didn't look like it was from being hit by a car or otherwise trauma-related.

"Chances are that it was a pre-existing condition," she said. "It may very well have been the reason he was in the road in the first place."

She said even if they had diagnosed the condition when the bird came in, there likely was nothing they could have done.

The passing of the bird, which was known at the clinic simply as "The Owl," deeply affected her, she said.

"We had high hopes, given the circumstances under which it came in," she said, "and in honor of Ms. Pearce.

"We all have soft spots for animals or we wouldn't be here," she said.

Reporter Keith Morelli can be reached at (813) 259-7760 or kmorelli@tampatrib.com.

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