Ozzie finds a permanent home in Ramona

And we think WE have a housing crisis.

Take a moment to think of poor Ozzie of the Owens family in Ramona, who has had three homes in a single month!

The first was taken over by a swarm of bees, so Ozzie and his parents were forced out.

The second was a makeshift affair, thrown together quickly on the kitchen floor.

And the third, hopefully final, home, is a brand new single-story California ranch-style job that Bill Owens put together with his power tools and now sits atop the backyard trellis that has the roses on it.

Oh, by the way. Ozzie is an owl, a baby owl to be more precise.

Back on May 5, Bill and Wilma Owens of 25183 Hereford Drive in Ramona found Ozzie wandering around in a daze, trying to get untangled from the ground cover that, fortunately, had broken his fall from the nest in a wooden owl house above.

For the second time in a year, bees have moved in as squatters in the owl house and forced the owl family out.

“In fact, we had to get professional exterminators out here a year ago,” said Wilma, who has been caring for Ozzie since his fall.

After all, to a fuzzy baby owl, Ramona must look like the raptor capital of the universe and he would just be a snack to them. And don’t let us even think about all those coyotes.

Clearly, Ozzie needed attention “stet,” as they say on those medical television shows.

First he needed a place to call home.

So Bill and Wilma fashioned a little nest out of a cardboard box and propped it up on paint stirring sticks to give the illusion of height, and Bill has since built a brand spanking new wooden one for the family.

Next came food.

Ramona is known for having a veritable flock (oh, SO sorry about that) of bird experts and they suggested that cow’s liver might be tempting to a baby owl.

A quick trip to the market and Wilma is busy cutting pieces of cow’s liver, and Ozzie was busy gobbling it down, if one might mix species.

But Wilma and Bill wanted to be careful not to become a dependent food source for Ozzie and hoped the parents would return and take over the feeding chores.

They needn’t have worried. Owls are good little parents and the next night they arrived with a celebratory dinner including part of a lizard and two small field mice—it’s the owl world’s version of surf and turf.

Since then, Mr. and Mrs. Owl have been excellent providers, said Wilma, though she occasionally supplements the larder with a few chicken wings, being careful to crack the bones into small pieces—it’s important for Ozzie to have some pieces of bone, the experts stressed.

Ozzie does not appear to be the adventurous kind, having only come to the front of the house a couple of times and otherwise stayed in the back, despite the fact that he has grown substantially.

Naturally, Wilma is ever vigilant regarding marauding bees.

Seeing one near the owl house one day, she promptly fashioned a little doorway affair that could shut the bees out, if necessary. Though an unofficial expert opined that, if a swarm of bees wanted to get into the gold storage room at Fort Knox, it probably could—let alone an owl house.