Rescued Mesa owl returning to the wild

An owl rescued last month along an SRP canal in Mesa will be let back into the wild. The great horned owl left hanging from a power line. It was tangled in fishing line until crews rushed in to cut her down and save her. And Liberty Wildlife stepping in to provide that life-saving care to her. Fox 10's Anita Roman visited the great horned owl this morning at Liberty Wildlife. Anyone who knows me knows I have a very healthy... Fear, respect of birds, but I'm here. I'm here at Liberty because you guys had an amazing rescue and we want to show off this massive accomplishment. That beautiful owl right there who won't stop staring at me on the left was rescued from Mesa. Tell us a little bit about what happened. It was early one morning and there were some passerbys walking along the canal and they saw an owl hanging by a wing from the power lines and that was her. And this is her and this is what was wrapped around her wing. This is fishing wire? Fishing line, yeah. Do we know where, like how this got on her wing, how it got on the power line? Well, you know, you see a lot of fishing line around water areas where people are fishing and sometimes they have to cut the line for whatever reason and they can't clean it up. Try to get them to clean it up. She probably went down to get a drink of water and somehow got tangled in the line and then flew off. There was a hook at the end of this, and that hook is what got caught on the line then, and she was dangling from that. Tell us about her injuries. So you can actually see that that right wing is drooping a little bit lower. There were no breaks or anything like that, but she did have some swelling there. So we had her on some medication for about two weeks. The swelling has gone down, but she probably will always have a little bit of a droop there. So just slight damage, but she flies beautifully. And so tonight she's going to be released and she's going to have a beautiful black. Flight back into the wild. What was the rehab like? Because you almost have to teach her how to fly again. Yeah, thankfully, she always wanted to fly. She's a wild girl, so she wanted to move it. It was just that she had so much swelling that we wanted that swelling to come down to make sure there wasn't any injuries underneath there. So no surgeries, just medication, and just wow. We call it cage rest. So she was inside relaxing. She's very lucky. She's amazingly lucky because everybody responded really quickly. Mesa Fire got out there, SRP got out there. Our team was ready for her to come into the hospital This SRP got her to us and that doesn't happen because they can die from stress. What I thought was really interesting are the images you sent us when you were cutting that fishing wire off of her. She was very calm and she allowed you guys to do that. She's a wild bird. Yeah. She wasn't thrilled but I think she was so tired from her struggle and our team also knows how to handle them really well. What type of owl is she and is it common to see them out in the wild here? She is a great horned owl and they are the most common owl that you find throughout North America. And what's cool about what you're looking at right now is she is the larger one and girls are bigger in the bird of prey world. So the one next to her is a little male. He's trying to make it up by puffing up his feathers. My God. How can people help you guys? How can they volunteer? Because you do this day in and day out. Yeah, we live off of our volunteers. We have over 400 volunteers that help from the rescue. and transport and going out and doing things to answering our hotlines, to being here in the enclosures on the daily, which you would love that job, I'm sure. Yeah, absolutely. 100%. You guys will be posting on Instagram. You'll be showing images of the release. Please stay where you are. Beautiful. Thank you. How can people find you on social? We are Liberty Wildlife AZ on Instagram and then Liberty Wildlife on Facebook. So you'll find our videos there and we also have YouTube. So we'll post all of her story within the next couple of days. Thanks for what you're doing, Laura. Thank you for coming in here. Happy flying.