BOULDER COUNTY, Co. — Video of a deputy “conversing” with an adorable baby owl at a Colorado campground has gone viral after it was recently posted online by the Sheriff’s Office.
A Boulder County Sheriff’s deputy encountered a baby owl on July 23, 2015.
This photo, along with a video, was posted to the office’s Facebook and YouTube pages the following day.
Deputies encountered the young Northern Saw-whet Owl while they were driving near a campground on Thursday, the office wrote on its YouTube and Facebook pages.
The owl is fairly common and generally seeks to avoid attention — a task it is normally quite successful at, according to the website Audubon.org.
The birds also hunt almost entirely at night.
But on this occasion, the baby owl was standing in the middle of a trail during daylight hours.
In the video, a female deputy can be heard talking to the owl, which in turn seems startled by her sounds and appears to be “clicking” back at her.
Audubon.org noted that the owl is usually silent but they communicate with each other through a monotonous series of tooting whistles, normally heard in late winter and spring.
The owl eventually safely flew away, according to the Boulder County Sheriff’s Office.
In the three days since it was posted to YouTube, the video — which was hashtagged #DeputiesLoveBabyOwls — has been viewed more than 1.8 million times.
On Facebook, it received more than 1,000 likes and has been shared more than 1,200 times as of Monday morning.