Lost in a melody by Stevie Wonder (was it "Higher Ground"?), long-time Magnolia resident Jeff Sweeney huffed along the heavily treed path just past the military cemetery in dusky Discovery Park when something hit him hard in the back of the head and dug into his skull.
With Wonder singing into his iPod and with night coming on, Sweeney didn't hear or see anything. But he suddenly felt talons digging into and pulling at his scalp. Baffled and spooked, he instinctively began swatting at the specter and ran faster down the path. When he turned and looked up, it was gone.
"I was shocked and scared and surprised," he said after what turned out to be an owl attack, the second at Discovery Park in two weeks.
When Sweeney got home, that night, Oct. 23, he had his wife look at his head under the light. She saw a series of claw marks in his head. He had thought it might have been a squirrel or maybe a bat. She said it was an owl. She had heard of owls attacking people like this and told him so. Somewhat rattled, Sweeney called his doctor to ask about a rabies shot.
"When he stopped laughing, he said, 'No, you're OK'," Sweeney said with a laugh himself.
The following week, at dusk on Thursday, Oct. 29, Sweeney's friend and fellow Magnolian Scott Roza made his usual rounds jogging up Viewmont into the park, out to the lighthouse and back. This had been his morning route for at least 10 years. And as the days got shorter, and with the Seattle Marathon less than two months away, he wanted to get some extra training in and began running at night.
"I was in the park right near the entrance on Emerson Street near Magnolia Boulevard," he said. Roza made his way across the bluff and up three or four stairs, when "I felt something hit me on the back of the head and knock my hat off." He thought it was a low-hanging branch but turned and saw a big bird flying away gripping his hat below. It flew into a big tree, then to another.
Roza thought it might be a hawk, but realized they're not night hunters. He figured the bird would drop the hat and he could come by the next day to retrieve it. As he jogged away he felt the talons dig into his head again.
"All of my senses were already alerted and I never heard the thing coming," he said. Now under a street lamp he saw the big bird pull away but not after leaving several marks in his head. For the next 200 yards, Roza jogged backwards, watching for the stealthy predator.
When he got home, Roza had his wife take a look and she saw about eight different scratch marks.
For more than a decade, five to six days a week, Roza has been running that route and has seen eagles, hawks, rabbits and coyotes but never any owls-let alone be attacked by one.
There are two commonly seen breeds of owls living in Discovery Park, the Great Horned Owl and the Barred Owl. There are also barn owls and the smaller Saw-Whet variety.
Roza's was pretty big, he said, and when it struck it had the impact of a soccer ball. He did some checking into it on Wikipedia and learned that Great Horned and Barred breeds are territorial especially during dusk in late winter or early spring. He said evenings in March are similar to those in October and perhaps the bird's circadian rhythm was out of whack.
An employee at the Discovery Park Visitors Center, who preferred her name not be used in this article, said both Sweeney and Roza's birds were likely Barred owls because they were large and because of the time.
"The Barred owl is the most common and when there's a barred owl around, they're so voracious and territorial the others don't stay around," the employee said. The owls primary hunting time is at dawn and dusk and from up in the trees, the top of someone's head can resemble an animal running by. "But by the time they get to your head, they realize you're not a small animal."
Both Sweeney and Roza have since resumed their jogging routines, though on his last outing, Sweeney brought along his purebred boxer, Alli just in case.[[In-content Ad]]
