The Owl That Fell from the Sky Read Online Free PDF Page A

wing, tail and beak, and soon confirmed from its size, and the colour and pattern of its plumage, that it was the widespread common barn owl and not one of the several other species of barn owl that live in Australia. The common barn owl also lives on many of the island groups in the south-west Pacific just north of New Zealand, so the bird’s geographic origin was uncertain.
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    This was, then, the fourth record of a barn owl in New Zealand. The bird may have flown across from Australia, or from a Pacific island, although this was less likely. Or it could have been smuggled in as a captive and subsequently escaped or been released. However, the girl’s father had mentioned a third possibility. The suburb where the bird had been found was close to Auckland International Airport and, depending on the wind direction, lay immediately under the flight path of jets as they came in to land.
    The museum’s reference collection was not extensive enough to include representative samples of barn owls from the Australian and Pacific island populations against which we could compare the mystery bird and come to a conclusion about its place of origin. The differences between these populations are not dramatic anyway, and the measurements we took, and then compared to published dimensions, were in the region of overlap and hence inconclusive.
    I now made a post-mortem examination. By locating the gonads inside the body cavity, I discovered the owl was a male. There was considerable fat around its stomach and large intestine, and a large mound of fat lay just beneath the belly wall. Inside the intestine, along its length, there was merely a paste-like residue of digested food remains. However, the gizzard, or muscular part of the stomach, contained a dark ball of matter. When I teased this out, I discovered a quantity of hair and small bones that proved to be the remains of a house mouse. This was no help to establishing what country the bird had come from, since the introduced European house mouse is found in Australia and most Pacific islands.
    In the gizzard, however, I also found a tiny insect head about one millimetre across. I consulted the museum entomologist, Keith Wise, who said this was probably from an ant.
    On Wise’s advice, I sent the tiny specimen to a curator at the Australian National Insect Collection in Canberra, who was able to identify it as belonging to a species of ant unique to Australia and common in grassy areas in and around cities of the south-east. The ant, presumably eaten accidentally while the owl was swallowing the mouse, pinned down the bird’s geographic origin.
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    We next approached the New Zealand Meteorological Service for information on wind strength and direction in the days leading up to the owl’s discovery. Winds had been strongly from the west and the conditions suggested that a bird at low altitude could have flown to Auckland from south-east Australia in under two days. But even after such a relatively short flight from Australia a bird would be expected to be lean, with an empty stomach, empty intestines, and little visible fat in its abdominal cavity. Given the fat condition of the owl, and the presence of food in its gut, it seemed far more likely that it had been foraging around an Australian airport, had roosted in the undercarriage bay of a large jet as dawn broke, and had become trapped there when the plane took off.
    Several types of Australian birds survive cold nights in the Outback by entering a physiological state of torpor: their metabolism slows until sunrise and the return of warmer daytime temperatures. The extreme cold in the jet’s unpressurised undercarriage bay may have forced the owl into some sort of torpid state and come close to killing it outright. When the wheels went down three hours later over Papatoetoe, the owl fell out and came to ground fatally sickened.
    A taxidermist transformed the owl’s body into a permanent