A fluffy owl tumbled into a St. George cement mixer. With ‘toothbrushes and mascara wands,’ these Utah rescuers slowly rehabilitated him.

Sierra Medlin said she wasn’t sure what to do when she first heard a great horned owl had fallen into a cement mixer in St. George.

“It was definitely a new situation for us,” said Medlin, small animal manager at Best Friends Animal Society’s sanctuary. What’s more, she said, “no other rehabilitators that we contacted had encountered that situation either.”

The sanctuary received a call on Halloween from the Utah Department of Wildlife Resources, alerting them to the owl’s sticky predicament.

Construction workers at Black Desert Resort were headed to pour concrete for a two-story underground parking lot when a man driving a cement truck thought he heard something hitting the vehicle, according to Joseph Platt, the resort’s director of environmental affairs.

It was early morning, he added, and the driver couldn’t see anything. But when they started pouring concrete from the truck, the owl came out with it.

The resort is preserving a 200-acre conservation area, Platt said, and it has a lot of wildlife.

But even though construction workers have found small birds building nests in the insulation of a hotel under construction, the owl’s unexpected appearance has been the wildest wildlife interaction so far, Platt said.

The next day, Best Friends picked up the bird and took him to their sanctuary in Kanab.

When the bird was poured out of the cement mixer, Medlin said, about a fourth of his body was covered in concrete. His right wing drooped from the weight of the heavy material, and he was lethargic.

The team at Best Friends, Medlin said, decided the best path forward would be to sedate the owl, so they could remove the concrete. Staff members pinched chunks of the rocky material off the bird’s feathers with their fingers, and soaked his wing in a mixture of water and dish soap.

“We would use toothbrushes and mascara wands, to just be as delicate as possible,” she said.

After a few sessions, the owl was slow to wake up. This complicated treatment, Medlin said. The team didn’t want to sedate the owl more than necessary, she said, so rescuers began carefully working with him while he remained fully conscious.

The team would cover his head to reduce stress, Medlin said. One team member would hold him while wearing raptor gloves, as other workers continued their gentle operation. When the bird started growing restless and clacking at the staffers with his beak, they would stop for the day.

Medlin said rescuers don’t name wildlife rehab patients, so they don’t give the impression they are pets. They referred to the owl simply as “Concrete Owl.”

After five or six cleaning sessions, Medlin said Concrete Owl was finally free of concrete. In a news release, Best Friends said he was flying just two weeks later, so he was moved to an outdoor enclosure.

What’s keeping the sanctuary from letting the owl loose in the wild, Medlin said, are his feathers, some of which were damaged in the cement mixer. Owls, she said, are reliant on flying silently to catch prey — and for Concrete Owl to swoop without sound, he must go through the natural molting process, shedding old feathers and growing new ones.

Medlin said she thinks the bird will likely be good to go this spring or summer. For now, Best Friends workers are making sure Concrete Owl doesn’t get used to friendly people or food deliveries.

That way, he’ll be ready to fly off into the wild as soon as he can do it quietly.

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