She learned the unvarnished truth in visits to the Phoenix enclave. For example, the great horned owl, which can stand 2 feet high with a 5-foot wingspan, is a potent predator with a crushing grip of 500 pounds per square inch (humans measure about 60). It can snatch its favorite prey, skunks, off the ground and fly away.
Rehabilitators who want to restore a baby bird to its mother often find a woven basket, attach it to a treetop and leave it inside for the older bird to find. You can't do that with a great horned owl.
"The average person should never re-nest an owl," Woods says, all but shuddering. "They can be vicious."
Curtis drew on those and other facts in "Baby Owl's Rescue," in which the mother of the main characters, Maddie and Max, just happens to be a wildlife rehabilitator.
The kids are smart enough to do what Woods recommends: Leave the bird where it is and summon information and help.
A fictional fireman in a protective suit ends up re-nesting the owl, and the kids go off to play baseball.
"The right happy ending," Woods says.
Coming together
When Woods and Curtis meet for coffee, Woods arrives with a barred owl in tow. As she walks it through a parking lot, perched on her leather-gloved arm, kids and grown-ups alike flock to her with questions.
The coffee shop won't admit the owl, which she leaves safely outside, but when Curtis arrives, she too has a gift: The first printed copy of "Baby Owl's Rescue," realistically illustrated by Colorado artist Laura Jacques.
"It looks perfect," Woods says, eyeing it through her spectacles.
"This is our book," Curtis replies.
It will be available online and in stores Sept. 1. As she has done with her other books, Curtis hopes to share it in Anne Arundel schools this fall.
Writing it may even have helped her chase a few demons. If Curtis had known at age 8 what she knows now, she'd have called a wildlife rehabilitator, not tried so clumsily to save that badly injured rabbit.
"Even if he couldn't have been saved, I'd have known I tried everything," she says.
Someday, she hopes a child who reads her new book will know better than she did.
"Our animals deserve no less," she says.
