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great horned owl - also easily imprinted. There's a good story that goes with this one.

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story?

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OK, so now that I think about it, it's not that interesting.

I can't remember how we got him, but he was still young - still an adolescent. We named him Alex. (Alex the Great... yeah, my parents are witty.)

Anyway, we had Alex for a few months, and he came to know my Mom's voice pretty well - she was the one feeding him, so she became "mom". When it came time to release him, somehow it was decided that he should be released in the local state park. This turned out to be a bad idea, as there were lots of people around, and here's this great-horned owl who's imprinted on human voices.

So a couple weeks later, Mom started wondering how Alex was doing, and we decided to go down to where we released him to call for him. Mom starts calling "Aaaaaallleeeeeex", and a couple minutes later we hear this "eeeEEEEEPPPP, eeeeEEEEEEEEpppp", and here comes a HUGE great-horned owl flying down from the hill. Of course, he comes looking for food, and we have none. We just wanted to check in.

Mom freaks out and sends me and a friend to hide in a shed, and Dad goes to the park office to get a dead gopher or something for the owl to eat. (They had a couple snakes for display, and always had something dead in the freezer.)

In the end, Alex got his gopher and I got a story that sounded much cooler in my head until I typed it out.