Wow! My Uncle was a wizard long before Harry!

He had an owl to deliver rabbit-package mail to him. How cool would that be!
Just so you all don't have to click through the comments, I'll just post it here.

Jayhawk said...

Oscar was a Great Horned Owl and, yes, my best friend Dale and I did carry him around in a bucket, but only until he developed feathers and learned how to fly. After that he rode on a leather sleeve on our wrists. As I recall he stood about two feet high and weighed about three pounds once he was grown.

We found him in the wild, all down and fallen from a nest which we could not locate. So we took him home and raised him. He hung out on the woodpile and bringing in wood became my job since he would attack anyone who approached other than Dale or me.

His favorite trick was to grab the caps off of our heads in full flight, which always came as a surprise since he approached from behind and we never heard him coming.

I had him for something over three years and he went rabbit hunting with us. The 22 rifle didn't bother him, and he caught more rabbits than we shot.

Since we had taught him to be a daytime creature he could not survive in the wild so when we left for Navy and college we donated him to the local zoo. He was, to my knowledge, doing fine about ten years later.



(Me again) I bet it would keep the squirrel population down too. This isn't a picture of Jayhawk's owl, just one I found so you all could see what a Great Horned Owl looks like.