Happy Thanksgiving

Wednesday was a quiet night, with snow flurries and cold temps. At Hidden Valley, George Gress and his crew wrapped up the season with balky batteries and no owls, while at King's Gap, Gary Shimmel's crew had one HY-F saw-whet, which came back into the nets a second time later in the evening.

King's Gap will be open sporadically in the next two weeks in the hopes of adding a few more owls to the telemetry study, but it will be closed through Monday night, when night-tracking will resume (assuming our one remaining owl, Andromeda, is still in the neighborhood then).

I'll also be running nets with a mixed long-eared owl and boreal owl tape on our property in Schuylkill County through the end of December. This has been an irruption year for boreals, with many reported in southern Canada and a few in New England. This is a species even more secretive than saw-whets, and the two records from Pennsylvania since the 1890s are probably not an accurate reflection of the owl's occurence down here.

In the meantime, Happy Thanksgiving from the Ned Smith Center's owl research crew.