Lou’s View

By Lou Bernard

When I was a kid, I wanted to take in every little animal I found. Dogs and cats, obviously. My family adopted a raccoon once. In about the fourth grade, we kept a praying mantis in a jar for a while. My brothers and I once found a wounded shrew and kept it in a box until we couldn’t figure out what it ate, and my father made us let it go.

Looking at the old archives, it’s nice to see that I’m not the only one who feels this way. Fifty-eight years ago, there was a similar incident up in Flemington.

It happened at 423 High Street, the home of Fred and Margaret Peters. Fred was a laborer, Margaret was a school teacher who worked summers as a cashier, and their daughter Susan was a seventeen-year-old senior at Lock Haven High School. Fred and Margaret had gotten married in 1927, and bought the house later. And every year, they decorated for the holidays.

Fred and Margaret were not the type of people who leave their Christmas decorations up until mid-March, and I hope my neighbors down the street are reading this and take note. For Christmas of 1962, they had a lot of nice decorations up, but as January arrived, it was time to take them down.

Fred went outside at about eight AM to begin removing the Christmas lights from the porch. As Margaret came out to join him, she noticed a little bundle on the porch, initially thinking it was a dirty rag. But when she went over and looked at it, she discovered that it was an owl.

A little screech owl had landed on the porch railing at some point overnight. As it sat, ice froze around it, freezing its feet to the railing so it couldn’t fly away. Unable to move, the owl simply remained where it was, in danger of freezing to death.

Fred carefully removed the owl, trying hard not to injure it. The owl, for his part, was fairly cooperative. They brought the owl inside and posed it in front of the Christmas tree for some photos, a pretty impressive activity in the days before Facebook. Then they wrapped it in a blanket and put it in their basement.

They called Oscar Hake, who lived at 415 Fleming Street, not far away. Hake was the projectionist at the Roxy Theater, a job he’d begun at age fifteen. He was also the local game warden, which was the pertinent fact here. Hake dropped by and looked the owl over, instructing the family to keep it warm for a while, and give it some mice to eat. The family being shockingly short of mice at that moment, they fed the owl some raw hamburger instead, and the owl ate it up.

After a few hours, the owl looked healthy enough to be released, so Fred took it out into the front yard and let it go. He set it in the grass, where the owl remained. It had been cared for a fed, and it saw no reason to end that arrangement immediately. It sat on the lawn, refusing to fly away, for about two hours until Margaret went back out and brought it back into the house.

The owl remained a guest of the Peters family for a while, even making the front page of the local newspaper. The headline read,”Warm Hearts Aid Owl Art Flemington After Icy Reception.” Presumably, the family bought some more ground beef to feed it.

Oddly, that month seemed to be a notable one for birds in general, because soon after, a pigeon named Mike grabbed the headlines over in Castanea. Mike was known for going to school with the local children, and also made the front page. (There is no record of Mike the pigeon and this owl ever meeting.)

So that was New Years of 1963….The year a little owl paid a visit to Flemington. “Should owl acquaintance be forgot….”