WINDSOR — Fire Chief Kevin McAllister was making his regular commute to work around 7:45 Wednesday morning when he saw something strange on the side of the road.
He turned around to check out the scene and found a barred owl sitting just off Route 5 near John P. Larkin Country Club. The bird was being harassed by a murder of crows. It was quickly obvious that it was injured and couldn’t fly.
“As fate may have it,” the chief is no stranger to wild bird rescues, he said in a Thursday phone interview. During his more than 30 years in emergency services, McAllister has rescued a screech owl while working for a Connecticut fire department and helped a juvenile bald eagle back to its nest in Windsor while working as a deputy game warden.
“Let’s just say I’ve been in the right place at the right time,” he said.
On Wednesday, he “blocked off the scene” with his vehicle so if the owl made a break toward the road people driving by would see the lights and slow down, he said.
Next, he and another passerby devised a plan and worked together to try to wrangle the bird.
In spite of its injured wing, there was no doubt the owl “still could hop very well,” McAllister said. It tried to make a swift escape when the two men approached to help it.
Luckily, the owl hopped up into a tree and caught its wing on a branch. The mishap gave the two good Samaritans the chance to capture it in a sweatshirt.
“It was just such a chill bird once it knew that we were there to help it and it seemed to sense that I wasn’t trying to hurt it,” McAllister said. The whole rescue took about five minutes.
McAllister then called the Vermont Institute of Natural Science Center for Wild Bird Rehabilitation in Quechee to take over care of the injured bird.
Unfortunately, as sometimes happens in fire response and emergency medical services, “we don’t always get the result we want,” McAllister said.
After inspecting the barred owl, rehabilitators at VINS decided to humanely euthanize it Wednesday, seasonal rehabilitator Bridget Reaggon said.
The injury, a fracture to the bird’s left elbow, probably happened about a week ago and likely came from a collision with a car or other trauma, Reaggon said.
By the time it got to VINS, the owl was thin and had likely not been able to hunt for a while. Its wing had already calloused and partially healed, so it could only extend about halfway which was why the bird couldn’t fly.
“Crows usually bother barred owls in the first place, but especially if they’re grounded they really start to swarm them,” Reaggon said. “So, if it was something that was put back out into the wild it’s unfortunately something that would’ve been terrorized by the crows.”
Barred owls are the VINS rescue’s “top patient in the wintertime,” Reaggon said. VINS has already seen eight barred owls so far in 2026.
Their injuries often come from collisions with cars. After the clocks shift in November, people spend more time driving in the dark, which greatly increases the chance of encountering barred owls, Reaggon said. Because the birds swoop low when they fly and chase prey wherever they might run including into the road, they often are hit by vehicles.
“Sometimes people will throw food out their window as well and a rodent is eating it in the road,” Reaggon said. “That kind of causes a chain of events.”
Later in January and in February, the trend shifts and the institute tends to see an uptick in reports of emaciated raptors, Reaggon said. These are often birds that hatched the previous spring and are struggling through their first winter.
Anyone who encounters a bird that appears injured should contact VINS.
“Basically, any bird that you can walk up to and it won’t fly away, there’s something wrong with it and we want to take a look at it,” Reaggon said.
More information about what people should do when they encounter an injured bird is online at https://vinsweb.org/wild-bird-rehab/wild-bird-rescue/. The VINS wild bird rehab can be contacted at 802-359-5000 ext. 212 during business hours and at 802-359-5000 ext. 510 after hours.