Kansas City, Kan. ? The Russian owl used to freeze Kansas City, Mo., and Independence, Mo., students in their tracks the way he stunned Darius Horn this week.

The teenager’s eyes met the bird’s eyes.

Silence fixed on silence.

“I was amazed,” Darius said, to think that this eagle owl was part of his regular freshman biology class, along with exotic lizards, pythons, tarantulas, turtles, ferrets, fish and hissing cockroaches.

But Bubo the owl isn’t in the Kansas City, Mo., school district anymore.

Nor were he and the rest of the menagerie taken in by Independence when the two districts executed a complicated boundary change over the summer.

The animal collection became a casualty in the tug-of-war over seven schools in west Independence – lost to both districts.

Instead, Bubo roosts today in a new cage across the state line in Bishop Ward High School in Kansas City, Kan., where Darius is a student.

“It was bittersweet,” said teacher Ignacio Alonso, who had nurtured the animals for 15 years. “It was sad to leave the (Kansas City) district. … At the same time, we have a wonderful opportunity here (at Bishop Ward).”

Alonso, a native of Spain, began collecting animals as a biologist working at the Lakeside Nature Center in Swope Park in Kansas City, Mo., in the early 1990s.

The Kansas City school district recruited Alonso in 1994 to bring his collection and teach in a nature center at Nowlin Middle School in Independence.

For more than a decade, Nowlin students held science lessons in their hands, the same way Bishop Ward freshmen did as they helped create terrariums this week.

“It’s pretty cool seeing all these animals in the same place,” Bishop Ward student Ricardo Madrigal said. He was helping fashion a new home for the green basilisk, a bright-colored South American lizard waiting in a terrarium on the shelf beside him.

“It’s the fastest lizard in the world,” he said.

For a while last spring, the Kansas City school district contemplated moving the nature center. At the time, associate superintendent Don Bell said the district could make space for many of the animals at East High School, which already housed the district’s agricultural science program.

But Kansas City, overwhelmed with the complications of the boundary change, was making no guarantees.

And staying at Nowlin did not seem like an option either. Independence school officials toured Nowlin at least twice during the spring but never contacted Alonso about keeping the animals there.

“I don’t think I saw it (the nature center) in its earlier glory,” Independence Superintendent Jim Hinson said. Independence has a science center in one of its middle schools, Hinson said, and it also has a live-animal program arranged with the new Bass Pro Shops store.

“I thought those satisfied our needs,” Hinson said.

With some 60 species and a total of well over 100 animals under his charge, Alonso had to secure their future.

Bishop Ward High School was remodeling its science facilities and was eager to make room for the homeless animals.

“This is hands-on learning,” said the Rev. Michael Hermes, president of Bishop Ward. “We thought, ‘What a great benefit this would be for our students.’ “

At Bishop Ward, Alonso is teaching a freshman class as well as an environmental science class for upperclassmen. The older students will be training as handlers and presenters who will take animals to some of the high school’s feeder middle schools.

“The potential is unlimited in what we are going to expose our children to in the life sciences,” Bishop Ward Principal Dennis Dorr said.