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What the hell would I hit an owl with? Do you really want to know? Are you sure you can handle this? Up to the challenge? Well, I would (and already did) just hit it with my car! What the hell did you think I was going to say? “I strangled the owl to death with my bare hands and then hit it in the face with a deflated volleyball!” No, just my car. I just can’t believe that after I said “I hit an owl this morning.” about 90% of the people I told asked frantically “With what?!”…dumbasses.

Anyways, I was driving and, if you couldn’t already tell, I hit an owl. It was early in the morning (about 7am) so it was still dark out. Seeing as how owls are nocturnal animals, I figured that maybe the poor guy had a long night and was just heading off for bed. He was standing on the far side of the two-lane road. He must’ve seen my headlights coming and decided to show off and fly right above my sedan as I drove by. There was one minor problem with his plan: I drive an SUV, not a sedan.

So I’m cruisin’ along and THUD! Just before the sound, I saw somewhat of a flash from the left side (which is how I know that the owl was standing on the far side of the road). At first I thought I hit a small leaping deer or maybe some suicidal ninja-baby. It wasn’t until I looked out my side window and saw the wing still hanging down from the roof of my car that I realized that I hit a bird of some kind. Seeing as how it was still on my car (I was still driving at this point…I slowed down slightly with the thud noise but felt no need to come to a complete stop), I decided to pull over and deal with the issue. Ironically enough, the nearest parking lot to pull over into was the one for the local animal hospital (but don’t get your hopes up for a death-defying rescue, because the place was closed and trust me, that owl was already fucking dead).

Since the wing is literally hanging down across the driver-side door (and I don’t want the wing to caress my head when I open the door), I climbed over and crawled out the passenger-side door. I looked and, sure enough, there was a fucking owl on the roof of my car. There wasn’t any damage or anything at all wrong with the car itself, apart from the newly flightless bird stiffly perched atop the roof of my car. What you have to realize is that I have a rack on top of my SUV for things like bikes, canoes, kayaks, car-surfing, etc. Upon closer inspection, I realized that this owl’s wing had fucking wrapped itself (several times) around the rack on top of my car. It was at that point that I noticed that I had left my handy dandy “Owl-Corpse-Removing-Pliers” at home, so I had to improvise.

I pulled some random stuff out of the back of my car and kind of poked the damn thing, but nothing much happened. It wasn’t a huge bird, but it was pretty well wrapped around the rack on my car. So then I find a towel, thinking that I can just grab the dead owl using the towel as some sort of magical barrier. Just before I started pulling on the thing, I realized that I didn’t want owl guts all over me. I mean, it was a miracle that the damn thing didn’t explode into a million owl chunks when I hit it. It’s structural integrity must have been severely damaged at that point. Rethinking the process let me to finding a large brush outside the animal hospital (the kind one my scrub a horse down with, I would imagine). The handle was solid wood and about 2 feet long; perfect for prying an owl carcass off the roof of a car.

Finally a few minutes later, a eery plop announced the release of the owl from my car…and the introduction of the owl to the middle of the parking lot. In an animal hospital, especially, you would think that they might not like finding a dead animal in their parking lot for no reason. So, I did the most logical thing: I flung the corpse into the bushes right in the middle of the parking lot and then drove away.

I honestly try to keep this from being a boring old “blog” where I just write about my crappy daily experiences, but I figured that this was just too entertaining to miss. Oh, and if you care, I think that it looked a bit like a snowy owl, but I’m not really a master of identifying owl corpses.