09/25/2026
Horrific. Glue traps should be banned.
A great horned owl in Los Angeles was found with both wings glued flat against its body and its tail feathers stuck to its legs. The glue trap itself was gone. Someone had pulled the bird off the board but the adhesive stayed on the feathers, and a great horned owl whose wings cannot open cannot fly, cannot hunt, and cannot survive.
The owl arrived at North Central Animal Shelter with almost no information attached to it. Nobody knew where it had encountered the trap, how long it had been stuck, or how it had been separated from the board. A volunteer collected it from the shelter and drove it to the California Wildlife Center.
Wildlife technician Alex Willis described what the staff found: thick adhesive contamination across both wings, binding the flight feathers together and fastening them against the body, with additional deposits around the lower legs that had caught the tail feathers as well.
Staff suspected the owl had attacked a rodent already stuck to the trap. A great horned owl hunting at night spots a mouse thrashing on a flat surface, drops on it, and drives both feet into whatever the mouse is standing on. The trap is not designed for a five-pound bird with a four-foot wingspan, but the adhesive does not care what it catches.
The owl lifts off with glue on its talons, folds its wings against its body in flight, and transfers the adhesive from its feet to its flight feathers before it understands what is happening. Nobody witnessed it. The staff's explanation was a reasonable reconstruction, not a confirmed sequence.
The treatment required three facilities. At California Wildlife Center, staff separated the wings from the body and the tail from the legs by hand, freeing enough range of motion that the owl was no longer stuck to itself. Residual adhesive still coated the feathers. They packed the contaminated areas with ground cornmeal, a technique that neutralizes exposed stickiness and prevents the bird from re-adhering to itself or its enclosure while waiting for a deeper cleaning.
The deeper cleaning happened at International Bird Rescue in San Pedro, a facility built for washing crude oil off seabirds after spills. The same heated wash stations and specialized detergents that strip petroleum from a pelican's plumage strip glue from an owl's.
The owl went through the wash process and came back to California Wildlife Center with clean feathers and a temperament that Willis described as decidedly uncooperative, which in a great horned owl is a sign that the animal is feeling like itself again.
Several more weeks of wound treatment followed. The adhesive had damaged skin beneath the feathers, and the rehabilitation period gave the owl time to regain full flight condition before release. A longtime donor to the wildlife center released the bird at an undisclosed location. By then its care had passed through an animal shelter, a volunteer driver, two wildlife rehabilitation organizations, a cornmeal treatment, and an industrial bird-washing facility designed for oil spills.
Glue traps are sold for mice and rats. Wildlife rehabilitation centers across the country receive animals stuck to them that were never the target: snakes pursuing rodents into buildings, lizards crossing a garage floor, songbirds investigating a trapped insect, and raptors attacking trapped prey from above.
A trap that does not discriminate by species and cannot be deactivated once set will catch whatever touches it.
Image is for illustration purposes only
Source: California Wildlife Center, Winter 2024 Newsletter / Alex Willis, CWC Wildlife Technician / International Bird Rescue, San Pedro / Wildlife Center of Virginia.
