Joel Wood set out for a solo cross-country ski on Wednesday night at Stake Lake near Kamloops, but ended up in the emergency room with several other skiers, who had all been attacked by an owl.
It was dark at 8 p.m. when Wood set out for a bit of exercise. When he arrived at the trails, a staffer told him not to go on the closed trail because of “an angry” great horned owl.
“So I was avoiding that trail. … But then quite early on in my ski I was tucking down this hill and suddenly something hit my poles and I’m like, ‘Wow that’s the owl, good thing it didn’t hit me,’ ” said Wood, who is an associate professor of environmental economics at Thompson Rivers University.
But about 100 metres on the enormous owl took another swipe at Wood.
“It hit me in the head and its talon kind of scraped my ear. It must have gone through my balaclava that was covering my head,” Wood said.
“And I turned around to see this massive, massive grey owl. It was quite startling but also quite cool to see this incredible wingspan. It was the biggest bird I’ve ever seen.”
Wood said he didn’t feel any pain but when he got back to his vehicle he noticed there was blood on his neck.
He called the 811 nurse line and they told him he should get a tetanus shot in the next 12 hours, just to be safe. So he went to the hospital in Kamloops, and the triage nurse told him three other people were waiting to see a doctor because of similar owl attacks.
The Overlander Ski Club, which operates the ski trails at Stake Lake, said the owl had “swooped and scratched” five different people in the trail network in different places Wednesday night.
“So all four of us got the tetanus shots around the same time in the ER and the people in the waiting room got a good chuckle out of that,” Wood said. “Everyone was laughing, so it kind of brought some levity to the situation.”
He said they were all minor injuries but it is important to get the shots to prevent infection.
“Clearly this owl is being territorial … all the attacks happened at different locations around that general area,” he said.
Conservation officers “think that the owl is probably building or going to start building a nest for the spring so it’s best just leave it alone until it decides to move on to somewhere else.”
Overlander staff said in a Facebook post that they have consulted some biologists and some other experts, and at this time the best advice is “to stay away and likely [the owl] will move on.”
The club said it is best to avoid these trails at night for the next week and ski in groups of people instead of alone. On Friday, the club said the owl was spotted a couple of time on Thursday night but there were no encounters with skiers.
“Owls are, of course, nocturnal, and much less likely to be active during the daylight hours, but still be aware,” the club said, in a post.
Staff said they will speak to conservation officers and put together a plan for what to do about the owl, and urged anyone who does get scratched to get a tetanus shot.
Owl attacks are rare in B.C.
In 2019, Whistler posted a warning about a barred owl, which had attacked a runner along a trail at Sproatt Mountain. The B.C. Conservation Officer Service had received a report that “an aggressive bird” that was swooping down on people along the Don’t Look Back biking trail located above the Function Junction neighbourhood.
In that attack, the runner was treated for minor injuries.
Wood said he won’t let the owl scare him away from skiing the trails again, but he will probably stick to the other side of the lake.
