When Jacob Frost first spotted the owl, he was hanging limp and apparently lifeless, twisted tight into the top two strands of a barbed wire fence nine miles east and a half mile north of Hennessey.

A Kingfisher County employee, Frost was making several trips down the same county road hauling dirt Monday morning.

When he passed the hapless owl a second time about three hours later, the bird turned his head and looked at him, blinking his enormous amber eyes.

Jake stopped his truck and hopped out to see if he could help the owl, but he was too entangled in a snare of his own creation. He’d apparently spun around and around in panic when his wings first became caught between the first and second strands, managing only to twist the strands even tighter around his outspread wings.

“That’s when Jake got us all involved,” said his aunt Tracie Macy of Hennessey, a former reporter and photographer for the Hennessey Clipper who documented the owl’s plight in photos and video and posted them on Facebook.

“Poor guy had his wings all twisted up in that wire,” she told the Times and Free Press.

Frost also called local Oklahoma Highway Patrol Trooper Tanner Beckner because, well, it was a roadway mishap of sorts.

Turns out Beckner has another skill.

“He’s an owl whisperer,” Tracy said. “We could never have gotten him free without Tanner. He was a pro!”

Armed with gloves, soothing voices and advice gleaned from a phone call to a wild bird rehab center, Beckner, Frost and Tracie’s husband James were able to free the bird and wrap him in a towel.

Beckner checked him out carefully on the side of the road and could find no broken bones.

Due to his lack of serious injuries, the rehab center recommended finding him a safe place to calm himself and rehydrate and only bring him into the center if he didn’t fly off on his own in a day or so.

The perfect place was just a mile away at the residence of Tracie’s parents, David and Sandy Simunek.

So “Hooty,” as he was dubbed, was carefully loaded into a pet carrier and taken for his first car ride.

“The rehab center said owls are super hard to rehab because when they are in trauma and then caged, they shut down and stop eating, starving themselves,” Tracie said. “So she thought this was the way to give him the best chance.”

Placed in a shady, sheltered area with a pan of water, Hooty appeared to settle in, fanning his wings to cool himself and later snacking on ground beef and grapes that Mrs. Simunek brought out to him.

By that time, the owl had hopped inside a circle of large hay bales, presumably where he could find more shade as well as shelter, Mrs. Simunek reported to her daughter.

“He was winking at me and had a clicking sound,” she wrote in a text. “I left in a hurry.”

Despite the rehab center’s prediction that it might take the owl a couple of days to be sufficiently recuperated, by Tuesday morning Hooty had already taken to the skies.

“Update: Hooty is now in the air!” Tracie posted on Facebook to a growing audience of supporters who was following his plight.

In the midst of uncertain times, it was a much-welcomed happy ending.