Was it something we said?

After having several terrifically cooperative owls like Isra, which we were able to track for more than three weeks, we've had a run of bad luck on the telemetry front. Fang and Feist, which we radio-tagged last week, both departed over the weekend while Drew, Kim and Hannah were enjoying a couple of days off.

So Monday night they tagged the only owl the King's Gap banding crew caught, a hatching-year female. They bandied around a couple of delicious food-themed names but thought better of it. "We were going to name it Meatballs, but we decided saying that name all night might make us hungry." Drew told me when he called from the woods around 9 p.m. with the news. "We figured it wouldn't be as big a problem with an owl named Tofu," so that's what they went with.

Instead, Tofu posed other problems. After tracking her for several hours near the banding station, the telemetry team followed her as she moved south over the ridge to Cold Spring Hollow, checking on her position every 10 minutes. And then around 3 a.m., between position checks, she simply disappeared. The crew fanned out for the rest of the night, checking from high points throughout Michaux State Forest, but Tofu had left the buffet.

Last night they tried for another telemetry owl at King's Gap, but came up dry - while we had owls at the other two sites, there were none caught at KG. We'll try again tonight.

We're up to 358 saw-whets and five screech owls for the season, still getting two or three a night at each station. In the past week we've had a number of foreign birds come into our nets ("foreign" meaning banded at another site), while several of our owls have shown up elsewhere.

Among the owls we've caught were birds banded at Tadoussac, Quebec in 2007; several from Glenn Proudfoot's operation at the Mohonk Preserve in southeastern New York; and three from Virginia - an owl banded in 2004 in the highlands of western Virginia, one banded in February 2008 in Shenandoah River State Park, and one banded in November 2007 at Kiptopeke on the southern tip of the Delmarva Peninsula. We've caught several other owls for which there was no data in the Banding Lab database.

Our owls have shown up in the past week in South Hadley, Massachusetts; Elk Neck State Park in northern Maryland; and several at Lamb's Knoll in the Catoctin Mountains of western Maryland.

We've also - finally - reached the end of the line with our geolocator project. Last night, Guy Ubaghs deployed the last two at Small Valley - 178 of the tiny tracking devices, which are continuously recording data that will allow us to determine the owls' daily latitude and longitude once we start recovering some of them next year.

None of this would have been possible without an extraordinary effort on the part of our banding crew, especially the banders from Small Valley, who double-teamed most nights this fall so one person could band and the other deploy up to 10 geolocators per night.

A few geolocator-tagged owls have shown up in our nets, and Sunday night I got a call from Dave Darney, who bands saw-whets on the Allegheny Front in Somerset County. He'd just caught a geo-tagged owl we released Nov. 6 at our Small Valley site, about 110 miles to the east. After checking the owl (it and its harness were both in fine shape), he released it - we're hoping to get up to two full migration cycles from the geolocators, so there was no point in taking it off after just nine nights and a relatively short distance traveled.

Busy week

We're supposed to be on the downward slide to the end of the owl season, but it doesn't feel like it.

Normally, our peak flights come right around Halloween, but a full moon Nov. 2, and a lot of unseasonably mild air, seems to have delayed the migration. The couple of big nights we had on Oct. 18 and 25 tend to mask the trend, but if you look at our capture totals in seven-night blocks, here's what you find:

Oct. 1-7: 0 saw-whets
Oct. 8-14: 9
Oct. 15-21: 74
Oct. 22-28: 60
Oct. 29-Nov. 4: 63
Nov. 5-11: 98

Last night, the 12th, we had another 21 owls between the three sites, and reports from the north make me suspect there are more to come. Holiday Beach in Ontario, across the river from Detroit, is still getting 20-30 owls a night, and Prince Edward Point, on the northeast shore of Lake Ontario, banded 500+ owls this season, of which only two have been recaptured - we normally get a lot of PEPtBO's birds, suggesting they're still to our north.

We've had a bunch of interesting foreign recaptures this week as well. Two have come from Glenn Proudfoot's operation at the Mohonk Preserve in southeastern New York, one from Quebec in 2007, and another from Virginia in 2008. We also caught another old saw-whet, banded as a hatching-year (juvenile) in 2004 by Clair Mellinger in Bergton, VA - which was quite a coincidence, because in 2005 we caught another of Clair's owls, banded that same night the year before.

So far we've caught 22 foreign owls, while eight of our birds have been reported from other sites. Both totals are a little on the low side, especially the latter.

The telemetry crew has been busy all week. Esmeralda had been hanging out south of King's Gap on private land, so they focused their attention on Isra, who has been a real challenge to track, covering a much larger area than past owls have done this year or last. Here's an example of one partial night's tracking, from dusk at 18:00 hours until about 2 a.m.; the polygons are color-coded from pale to dark to make it easier to follow her movements over time.

The results of one night of tracking Isra, the wandering saw-whet. (©NSCNA)

That night, she covered an area about twice the size of a typical half-night track for one of our 2008 owls. Whether this is just an expression of her personality, her hunting skill (or lack thereof) or a general scarcity of prey, we can't yet say.

On Tuesday night, I joined the tracking crew to follow Isra around Buck Ridge and upper King's Gap Hollow. That night she was behaving herself a little more, making it easier for Hannah and Drew to track her, although Kim had to keep shifting to get a clear bearing.

That same night, the KG banding crew put another radio on a new owl, an adult female nicknamed Fang (hey, just because we think they're cute doesn't mean they aren't ferocious little predators). Two nights later, they tagged an HY female dubbed Feist, because it pulled so much blood from Drew during harnessing.

The timing was perfect, since both Esmeralda and Isra left the same night. Isra in particular had been a real trouper, sticking around since Oct. 19 and giving us a lot of data.

We're almost done deploying our geolocators - out of 178, we have about 15 left. None of the geolocator-tagged owls have turned up at other sites, but then, only one of the 326 owls we've banded so far this year have been recaptured by another site - the remarkable "Wrong Way" Corrigan of an owl I wrote about last weekend.

Wrong Way Corrigan

Our own Wrong Way Corrigan after her recapture (©Tom LeBlanc)

In 1938, aviator Douglas Corrigan made a transcontinental flight from California to Brooklyn. Flush with his success, he wanted to try another nonstop flight immediately, this time across the Atlantic from New York to Europe. He'd been trying to get permission for the flight for two years, but his rickety plane, which was basically held together with spit and baling twine, was not considered safe, and his flight plan was again denied.

Corrigan took off, supposedly to return home to California. Instead, he landed 28 hours later in Belfast, Ireland, and until his dying day he swore that he'd simply gotten lost. Manhattan threw him a tickertape parade, the New York Post ran a backwards banner headline that read HAIL WRONG WAY CORRIGAN, and a legend (and an expression) was born.

It looks like we have our own Wrong Way Corrigan. On Oct. 26, my crew and I banded 24 saw-whets at our Hidden Valley site in Schuylkill County, just north of the town of Friedensburg. The last owl of the night was an after-second-year female (meaning she was at least three years old, possibly older).

Imagine my surprise when I learned that this same owl was recaptured Friday night - not south of us, as you'd expect, but in Allegany State Park near Salamanca, New York, at a site run by bander Tom LeBlanc.

That's almost 170 miles to the northwest - the wrong way for any bird that's supposed to be migrating south for the winter.



The odd thing is, this isn't all that odd. Coincidentally, the day before this recapture, a number of saw-whet banders had been discussing birds moving in unexpected directions - speculating whether this was a result of immature birds undertaking a form of dispersal flight, or a manifestation of the nomadism many of us suspect is a constant theme in saw-whet life.

The subject arose when banders in Massachusetts twice recaptured (at two different sites) an owl banded in a previous fall in Kentucky. Some of our birds banded in Pennsylvania have subsequently been caught in Illinois, Michigan and Ohio, and we've caught owls banded in Michigan, Wisconsin and western Ontario. But in most of these cases, a year or more elapsed between banding and recapture.

Last year, however, another of our owls (also an adult) made a long flight to the northeast, showing up 118 miles to the northwest a week after we banded her, in nets run by our colleague David Hauber near Hebron, PA.

So what's going on? I tend to think this has less to do with "lost" owls and more to do with an evolutionary approach that uses nomadic behavior to find areas of abundant food, both during breeding and nonbreeding seasons. After all, historians like to point out that whatever his claims to the contrary, Corrigan certainly knew exactly where he was flying.

There is circumstantial evidence to suggest that saw-whets are highly nomadic during the nesting season - that unlike most birds, which return faithfully to the same nesting territory every year, saw-whets may slosh around the boreal forests of Canada and the northern United States - maybe in Quebec one year, and the next in central Ontario, where the mast crop (and thus the rodent population) is higher. Then in the fall, instead of coming south through New York and Pennsylvania, the owl crosses through the Great Lakes region into Michigan and Illinois.

They may also be nomadic in the nonbreeding season, too, shifting widely across the landscape. While rare among raptors, such constant wandering is common among many boreal birds, like crossbills and pine siskins.

This is just speculation, but our geolocator study may shed some light on these questions. Because the data loggers will collect information from which we can plot the rough daily position of the owl for up to two years, we may finally get some hard evidence to explain whether they are as nomadic and unpredictable as these rare banding encounters suggest.

Unfortunately, because I was shorthanded the night we caught this owl, I didn't fit her or most of the other saw-whets that night with geolocators. But I suspect the owls we have fitted with the devices will provide some real surprises when we start recovering some of the geolocators next year.

Too busy to write

George Gress banding a saw-whet at Hidden Valley (©Scott Weidensaul)

It feels as though we've gone from 0 to 60 around here in no time flat. After a miserable weekend Oct. 15-17, with tons of wind-driven rain, and some snow at the higher elevations, the skies cleared out Sunday, Oct. 18 and we started catching owls - 32 that night, 17 of them at Hidden Valley alone.

All three sites are attaching geolocators, and we've deployed about 30 of the 190 we need to send out this fall. And we've radio-tagged two more saw-whets, which the crew nicknamed Elvira (a hatching-year female) and Isra (a second-year female). Xena, which was tagged Oct. 12, seems to have left the area, but Skreech the screech-owl remains on its territory near King's Gap.

Thank goodness for Skreech. Last weekend, as the worst of the weather was descending, our colleagues Nick and Mary Freeman, who study breeding owls (including saw-whets) in the mountains around Los Angeles, flew in from California. Their first night of banding was canceled due to rain, and Saturday night we were determined to get them out for radio-tracking - except that Xena had bugged out in the rain the night before.

So it was Skreech to the rescue. For three hours in clammy mist and occasionally heavy rain, we gave Mary and Nick a tutorial in basic radio triangulation techniques, along with tips on getting your data sheets soaked, holding dual umbrellas to shield the tracker, and avoiding drips of icy, barely-above-freezing rain down the back of your neck. Mary asked, "Is Pennsylvania always butt-freezing cold?" At this time of the year, often.

Fortunately, they were still in town the next day when the skies cleared and north winds began to blow. They had a few great hours of hawkwatching at Waggoner's Gap, then joined us at Hidden Valley for our 17-bird night.

Since then, the weather has grown considerably less butt-freezing, and with Indian summer, not surprisingly the number of owls has dropped off, down to five to eight per site each night. Still, we're up to 75 for the season - below average but making up ground rapidly.

Tuesday night the telemetry crew were chasing Isra up in Michaux State Forest. Between the canopies of the trees, they could see patches of star-splashed sky - and the whizzing, bright trails of the Orionid meteor shower, which graced the final hours of the night before they put Isra to bed, and went off to get some sleep themselves.

Geolocators

Although a big nor'easter storm has temporarily shut us down, we had an exciting couple of nights before the rain and snow hit. Drew, Kim and Hannah have been tracking Xena and Skreech as they hunt the woods near King's Gap. On the banding side, while the number of owls remains quite low for this time of year - just 10 saw-whets and two eastern screech-owls - we've begun deploying the light-sensitive geolocators we're using this season to study their migration.

A light-sensitive geolocator, which weighs about 2.5g (©Scott Weidensaul)

The geolocators are miniature, backpack-mounted data-loggers, continuously monitoring light levels for up to two years, from which we can determine the rough latitude and longitude of the migrating owl. The tiny units are custom built by the British Antarctic Survey, and have been used to study the migrations of wood thrushes and purple martins, but never saw-whet owls.

This week we began fitting saw-whets with geolocators at our Hidden Valley station, and will soon be doing so at all three of our sites. The harness is made from thin, tough Teflon ribbon that figure-eights around the bird's body, holding the geolocator high in the middle of the back. A short stalk sticks up above the feathers, with the light sensor at the tip. The entire unit and stalk are encased in a light, thin shell of epoxy to protect the innards from sharp owl beaks.

A saw-whet, fitted with a geolocator and ready to go. The sensor stalk protrudes an inch or so above the feathers on the back, continuously recording daylight and darkness. (©Scott Weidensaul)

(A special thanks to Marge Gibson and her staff at the Raptor Education Group in Wisconsin, who tested the geolocators and the harnesses on three of their captive saw-whets, even going so far as to create nest boxes with natural flicker- and pileated woodpecker-sized entrance holes, to make sure the sensor stalks didn't interfere with the owls' ability to enter and exit the cavities.)

We were also grateful to York University grad students Maggie McPherson and Callie Stanley for giving up their (Canadian) Thanksgiving holiday to come south to help with the work, and to give us the benefit of their geolocator experience working with thrushes and martins under Dr. Bridget Stuchbury.

From left: Callie Stanley, bander Nate McKelvie (front), Maggie McPherson, Pat Trego (rear), Nada Farah, Baha' Ishaq (rear), Ika Rani Suciharjo and Maria del Mar Contaldi. (©Scott Weidensaul)

Finally, we were delighted this week to welcome a number of the international interns from Hawk Mountain Sanctuary, which is not far from Hidden Valley. Marie del Mar Contaldi from Argentina is working on a master's on vulture and condor biology; Nada Farah from Lebanon serves as the country's Important Bird Areas coordinator; Baha' Ishaq from Palestine is an undergrad at Bethlehem University and the only licensed ringer (bander) in the Palestinian territories; and Ika Rani Suciharjo from Indonesia is a high school biology teacher with extensive experience in environmental conservation. As you can see from the picture, they were thrilled with their first encounters with saw-whets.

Xena, visitors, and better things to come

Well, things are started to click along down here, slowly but surely - and it appears the flood gates have finally opened to our north, promising better owling to come.

Although we only caught two saw-whets Monday night - one at Small Valley and one at King's Gap - the latter bird, an immature female, left with a radio transmitter and a nickname that intern Hannah Panci came up with - Xena, for the TV warrior princess, in recognition of this little fighter's spirit. From her release until about 3 a.m., Xena stayed on the ridgetop near the banding station, then moved down the west side of the mountain, staying put until the tracking crew left her at 7:30 a.m.

Although we didn't have any owls at Hidden Valley, we did have a couple of interesting guests, who will be with us all week. Maggie McPherson and Calandra (Callie) Stanley are grad students at York University in Toronto, studying with Dr. Bridget Stuchbury, a specialist in songbird migration, and one of the first scientists to use geolocators like the ones we'll be deploying this fall.

Maggie and Callie are both working with wood thrushes and purple martins at Bridget's study site in northwestern Pennsylvania, and Callie is also tagging thrushes on their wintering grounds in Costa Rica. They've given up their fall break to drive down from Toronto and spend the week helping us with our geolocator work - and spend some time with owls, since Maggie began banding NSWOs in ninth grade in Ontario, working the Timiskaming stations run by Bruce Murphy.

Speaking of whom, Bruce posted a happy warning to those of us to the south that the wait may soon be over. Friday night they had 95 saw-whets, one of their biggest nights ever, although high winds have cut their catch rate since then. They're up to 390 for the season, and he thinks we in the south will have the roughly average flight I've been expecting this year, which for our sites would mean around 450-500 owls.