DURHAM, N.Y. (AP) \u2014 Shoppers in upstate New York earlier this month turned up a rare find while perusing a local antique store this month: a live owl resting peacefully among items on a shelf.<\/p>\n
The state Department of Environmental Conservation said Friday that the incident happened on Feb. 21 in the hamlet of East Durham, about 127 miles (204 kilometers) north of Manhattan. <\/p>\n
The agency said customers at The Market Place had spotted \u201csomething extremely lifelike\u201d on one of the shelves and alerted store staff.<\/p>\n
Environmental conservation police officers arrived to find a brown-and-white owl perched on a shelf with its eyes firmly shut. It was resting next to a cookie jar made in the shape of a chicken. <\/p>\n
The department said officers gently cradled the sleeping owl to remove it from the store, and then released it into a wooded area, where it flew into a nearby tree.<\/p>\n
The bird, an eastern screech owl, is nocturnal and typically nests in tree cavities. <\/p>\n
It’s not immediately clear how it got inside the store. An email was sent to the store’s owners on Friday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"DURHAM, N.Y. (AP) \u2014 Shoppers in upstate New York earlier this month turned up a rare find while…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":147968,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[25536,41720,62082,18924,118,9,11,10,49,51,50],"class_list":["post-147967","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-ap-business","tag-ap-climate-and-environment","tag-ap-oddities","tag-ap-u-s-news","tag-associated-press","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-headlines","tag-new-york-news","tag-new-york-state","tag-new-york-state-headlines","tag-new-york-state-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147967","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=147967"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147967\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/147968"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=147967"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=147967"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=147967"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}