A neighbour in a wheelchair kept the dogs off an injured owl in the Presidio until John Murnane arrived with a towel, and more than a year later the bird is still turning up in his garden.

A great horned owl that was picked up injured near Mountain Lake Park in the Presidio in June last year has spent the months since coming back to the garden of the man who carried it out, Mission Local reported on 20 September.

Dr John Murnane, 78, is a professor emeritus at the University of California, San Francisco and a retired molecular biologist who spent his career in cancer research, and alongside that he has written three novels, photographed the birds of the Presidio and volunteered as a waterbird docent on Alcatraz, which is where he picked up whatever he knows about handling a bird that is in trouble.

The call

In June last year his neighbour Cindy Samucha, who uses a wheelchair, was out near Mountain Lake Park when she came across the owl on the ground with something wrong with its right wing, and she stayed where she was, keeping the curious dogs at a distance and waiting for animal care and control, who never arrived, until it occurred to her that there was one person she could ring instead.

I know who to call: John, the bird guy.Cindy Samucha, to Mission Local

The towel

Murnane put on a thick coat and a pair of gloves and went straight down to the park, where the owl hobbled away from him and snapped its beak at him in self-defence until he managed to get a towel over it.

After that, it just melted.John Murnane, to Mission Local

He says he had no idea at the time that there is a saying among wildlife rescuers, towels for owls, and that an injured owl with a towel thrown over it will generally stop struggling altogether, which is exactly what this one did.

Ninety minutes

He rang a wildlife centre in Marin County and was told that it would not take the bird because it was not a Marin resident, so he drove it himself to the Peninsula Humane Society and SPCA down in Burlingame, where he had taken birds from Alcatraz before, and the two of them spent an hour and a half together in rush-hour traffic.

He was in the back seat, and I felt sorry for him, so I was talking softly to him most of the time.John Murnane, to Mission Local

The kitchen window

Weeks later the rehabilitators let the owl go in the wooded part of the Presidio near Murnane's house, and not long after that his wife glanced out of the kitchen window and shrieked.

I turned around, and it was looking right at me.John Murnane, to Mission Local

Murnane will not say for certain that the great horned owl now turning up in his Inner Richmond garden is the same bird he wrapped in a towel in June last year, only that nothing in the evidence rules it out, and it has been coming back for more than a year now.