It’d make a great spirit animal.

I hunt whitetail deer once a year and even that much meat is barely worth the effort.

Most hunters I’ve met are decent people who care about animals and the environment, but then you have some real oddballs at the other end of the spectrum. I don’t know if those types have respect for much of anything, themselves included. I don’t know all the small mammals available in Austria, but if they’re much like squirrels or rabbits in NA, they aren’t all that exciting and tasty to be violating federal laws over.

The owls didn’t leave or die off because they’ve lost their role, they’ve been eliminated by this same type of thoughtlessness. You will have a better overall environment, including for hunting, if you take care of your ecosystem, mainly by leaving it the heck alone.

Rye crisps are the best part of snack mix to me!

Fig and Pig is a great combo for pizza!

I do like that better, but patient #750 for the year is such a nice number. Very factorable!

That’s my initial thought. The leukistic owls, where they end up all white, also do very poorly and are usually blind to some extent. It usually seems there is more than just the generic switch for color that gets flipped the wrong way.

On the Austrian side, the action was temporarily suspended due to the illegal shooting of released owls and ongoing protests by hunters who feared a negative impact on small game hunting. A specific animal protection project of the Association for Landscape Conservation & Species Protection in Bavaria eV, founded in 2015, was the reintroduction of the Ural owl in the Steinwald Nature Park in Upper Palatinate.

German Wiki

I’d argue the restoration of natural populations of native animals is more important than sports entertainment. The killing of the owls sounds to mainly be a protest of sorts.

Flip halfway through to ensure even browning.

This photo was taken toward the end of the procedure, while the owl was still anesthetized (the orange tube is a monitor that goes down the esophagus and the clear tube is delivering oxygen and anesthetic gas into the owl’s trachea). The silver bar is an external fixator that holds all of the surgical pins in alignment, and padding is added around the bar and pins to keep the area protected. All of the metal pieces that hold the fractured bone in place are very lightweight - the total weight added is not even half the weight of one of this owl’s mouse meals!

Dr. Avery pins the owl’s fractured humerus while Wildlife Rehabilitation Manager Stephanie monitors the patient’s breathing, heart rate, temperature, and other vital signs. During this procedure, Stephanie was also manually administering breaths to the owl every ten seconds using the inflatable green bag in her left hand.