Sacagawea and Andromeda

The news over the past week has been mixed, with tracking limited by the holiday and the opening of rifle deer season. On Nov. 28, Karl Kleiner and one of his students tracked down Andromeda, which they found perched in a cluster of young pines at Cold Spring Gap, with a spectacular view over South Mountain.

The view over Cold Spring Gap (©Karl Kleiner)

Andromeda plays "if I can't see you, you can't see me." (©Karl Kleiner)

After that, though, Andromeda vanished on us - but on Dec. 2, Aura Stauffer caught a whisper of a beep from Sacagawea's radio, a bird we'd last encountered on Nov. 20. She had a hard time localizing the weak signal, as did Anna Fasoli the next day, but on Thursday, Aura tracked down the transmitter - which was no longer attached to an owl. Sacagawea had picked off the harness - something we design the harnesses to eventually permit, but which we wouldn't happen quite so quickly.

The King's Gap banding crew has tried this past week to catch additional owls for the telemetry project, but the well appears pretty dry, and they've had little to do but watch the ever-growing mob of flying squirrels (now up to five) that feast nightly on the sunflower seed stored in the KG basement. After this weekend we'll suspend regular banding there, although we may try one more blitz next week to get a last owl or two.

I did manage to catch a second long-eared owl in my yard nets in Schuylkill County last week, as well as a local gray-morph screech-owl Wednesday night.

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.

A gorgeous mystery

Unexpected visitor: A long-eared owl (©Scott Weidensaul)

We got fooled by the weather Saturday night - the front that was supposed to linger through the evening, and which caused all three sites to cancel banding by late afternoon, swept through with unexpected speed before dark. I found myself outside at 7 p.m., seeing a few stars through the clouds, and wondering if there might be a way to salvage the evening.

Two weeks ago, I'd strung two 100mm mist nets in our backyard, between thickets of viburnum and dogwood shrubs and a line of white pines. My quarry wasn't saw-whets, but long-eared owls, a species about which we know, if anything, even less than we do about saw-whets. They winter here in the Pennsylvania Dutch farm country, at least in small numbers, but essentially nothing is known about their migration through this region.

Some years back I wondered if it would be possible to lure long-eared (or LEOWs, to use the banding code) the same way we lure saw-whets, using a tape of their calls. But the experts told me LEOWs didn't respond to such lures, and I'd never followed up on my plans. This fall, however, a few Canadian banders reported success using a LEOW lure, so I decided to give it whirl at the house.

I've been home so infrequently this season that I only had two opportunities to try, both on damp nights with rain coming in - poor nights for any kind of migration, and I wasn't surprised to come up empty.

With the front clearing out and the breeze picking up from the northwest, though, conditions were looking pretty good last night, so I opened the nets, ran an extension cord out behind the garage, and plugged in a CD player set to REPEAT on a track of a male LEOW's advertisement call, a low, hollow "hoot...hoot...hoot."

To be honest, I really wasn't expecting much, but when I checked the nets an hour later, to my delight I found a gorgeous hatching-year long-eared owl hanging in one pocket - and a mighty angry one, at that. There was none of the docility of a saw-whet; this bird hissed and bill-clacked ferociously, and I recalled something my colleague Katy Duffy, who catches a number of LEOWs in her saw-whet nets at Cape May, had said - that handling a long-eared can be like taking a feral cat out of a net.

Once I had the bird in hand, however, it was easy to control, though I used the old hawk-bander's trick of slipping it into a tube (in this case, two small coffee cans end-to-end) to confine it for banding and measurements. It was a smallish bird, taking a size 5 band versus the larger 6, but the wing chord of 286mm was right in the mid-range for both males and females. Despite its small size, the dark buff wing linings make me think it might have been a female, although its gender was officially recorded as U.

(©Scott Weidensaul)

After a few one-handed photos (my wife, to her dismay, wasn't home and missed the fun), I allowed the owl's eyes to readjust to the darkness for five or 10 minutes before I tossed it into the air and watched it arrow away to the safety of the pine trees around my neighbor's fields. I kept the nets open for a few more hours, but got no more LEOWs -- but you can be sure we'll be trying this technique on a regular basis in the future.