Local man misses owls, wants to know what happened

MOSES LAKE — Vic Fuller wants to know what happened to the owls that lived on his small farm northeast of Moses Lake. He is offering a $200 reward to help get some answers.

“We had two owls that lived here,” the 84-year-old Fuller said. “One had been around here almost 30 years; it was here when we moved here in 1983, or shortly after. The other came about 10 years ago.”

A male and female pair, Fuller said, though he wasn’t quite sure what kind of owls.

In January, Fuller said one of the owls disappeared. At first, he thought it likely died of old age, “landed on a branch and just gave it up.” But after hearing a gunshot three weeks ago, and finding the remains of an owl not long after, he thinks the birds were likely shot.

“I heard a gunshot and I didn’t think much of it, but when I went outside later there was no hooting,” Fuller said.

After he and a friend, Dennis Davis, did a fairly intense search of the land around Fuller’s house, Fuller said they found a pair of wings and what was left of a carcass.

“There were no bodies. The cats or the coyotes got to the bodies,” he said. “The last one had two wings. The first one was pretty well stripped.”

“I think both of them were shot,” Fuller added. “Game warden didn’t think there was enough left to determine if it was shot, but I heard the shot and I just know that’s what happened.”

Dan Sullivan, an officer with the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife in Ephrata, came out to see what Fuller had found. Because raptors — and that includes owls — are federally protected, killing them is a crime, Sullivan said.

But Sullivan said too much time transpired before Fuller contacted Fish and Wildlife and too little was left of the birds to determine how they died.

“There wasn’t much to investigate,” he said.

Sullivan said Fish and Wildlife gets about three or four calls every year to investigate dead raptors.

“It’s not frequent,” he said. “They’re usually hit by a car or electrocuted. Eagles and birds with bigger wings will touch two different (power) wires with their wings and get electrocuted.”

Fuller said he misses the owls, and that his farm is too quiet without them.

“I really enjoyed them around here,” he said. “They were always hooting. It was like they were talking to you when you went outside.”

Charles H. Featherstone can be reached at [email protected].