Updates on owl, election stories

Last week we printed a photo of an owl perched on a fire hydrant on Puget Island. Reader sent that photo to us; we appreciate it.

On Tuesday, we learned an update about that owl.

Rob Stockhouse said the photo was taken near his farm on West Birnie Slough Road. He later found the owl with his chickens. It had killed two and was having a feast. When he approached, it tried to fly away, but it had been injured, Stockhouse observed, and it was trapped in the chicken yard.

Stockhouse called a raptor rescue service, and a person from that firm caught the owl and placed it in a transporting cage in seconds.

Stockhouse said he hadn't yet learned how the owl's recovery was proceeding.

Moving on, a letter writer takes me to task for ulterior motives and poor handling of the write-in race involving Steven McNicholas and Dale Jacobson.

Long ago, in the interests of fairness, The Eagle adopted a policy of ending campaign coverage two issues before an election. By doing that, we afforded candidates and readers an opportunity to respond to articles, editorials or letters about races or issues before the voting on election day. With the advent of vote-by-mail, that cutoff is moved into October when the ballots come out. We've observed that most people vote soon after receiving their ballot, and I've concluded that election coverage after that not only opens one to a charge of unfairness, but it's probably not going to reach many voters.

In this case, Jacobson's "campaign" came after the ballots had been mailed. I tried to reach him for an interview the first week, but he was out of the area, and McNicholas commented that he didn't want to have a high profile campaign.

Jacobson furnished a statement the week before the election. I felt voters should know why he wanted to run, even if it was beyond the cutoff. To be fair to McNicholas, I showed the statement to him and asked if he wanted to comment. He conferred with his advisors, and they declined to respond.

They did hope I would print the statement verbatim, as it had several typos, but I said I wouldn't do that to him (McNicholas) and I wouldn't do that to Jacobson.

So the story came out, and I highlighted what I interpreted to be Jacobson's campaign theme in the headline.

After the paper came out, I learned that this handling of the "campaign" was unsatisfactory to McNicholas's supporters; the letter printed elsewhere is proof.

Elections. I live and I learn.