The Raptor Center, the University of Minnesota veterinary facility that treats injured birds of prey, is asking officials to remove soccer nets after several owls became snared in them, according to the center.
It's a problem the St. Paul-based clinic, part of the University's College of Veterinary Medicine, has been sounding the alarm on. In one recent stretch, staff disentangled six great horned owls, three barred owls, a red-tailed hawk and a broad-winged hawk from netting over the course of a single year — including five owls freed from nets in just one week that September.
Raptor Center staff say athletic fields are a trap by design for young, inexperienced hunters. Lori Arent of the Raptor Center has explained that owls chasing rabbits at night will hit the mesh head-on because rabbits can duck beneath it and owls can't. "They will chase rabbits and things at night and the rabbits can sneak underneath the nets and the owls can't. And so the owls will go straight into them and they'll get entangled," Arent said.
Once tangled, a bird can struggle for hours, cutting off blood flow to a wing and sometimes killing tissue even when there's no visible wound.