Whoooo goes there?

I found this motion detector activated garden owl at Goodwill for a few dollars and thought it would make an excellent Halloween decoration.  When it senses your presence, it gives several startling hoots and the eyes light up yellow.  When I brought it home, I set it up as a sentinel at my office door, but my dog Buckley seemed to think it was a toy for him, and promptly knocked it over breaking a hole in it, and eating several of the shattered pieces.

So before I could paint it, my first order of business was to repair the hole.  I glued the pieces he didn't manage to eat with Gorilla Glue, but of course a small hole still remained.  I covered the hole with a piece of black electrical tape, smoothing it over the feather contours, and then sealed the edges with a light handed application of hot glue.  I then used the hot glue over the electrical tape to mimic the feather texture.  Then I could tape over the eyes with Scotch Blue Painter's Tape, and I covered the motion detector eye with a bit of moldable eraser (chewing gum would work too.) and I was ready to paint.  I used the same steps as last years glitter owl bookends which you can find here.  I actually would have left the owl just black, without the glitter, but I found I needed the glitter to camouflage over the patch job I did.  For some reason the adhesive left a the owl with a dusty finish, resulting in a paler black then I would have preferred, perhaps because it was an old can.

If you want to DIY one of these yourself, you probably find one of these owls at any garden center or nursery, as they are intended to scare off rodents and pests.  Below is a video of it in action, please excuse the background noise and shaky camera work!

The end result is perfect for placing by your front door to surprise trick-or-treaters!