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.

Owl Nightlife, or... what does a saw-whet do at night?

We have now been tracking Isra for over 2 weeks now, with a lot of good data coming from our long nights at King's Gap and in the Michaux State Forest. With the migration season in full swing for the owls, we are now starting to hear the strange barks and whines of the saw-whets as we are walking through the forest. Sometimes it's the owl we are tracking, but often it is another saw-whet in the woods.

Isra perched high in a pitch pine

Isra has a routine going for her that she repeats every night we have been tracking her. Soon after dark, she leaves her roost and becomes very active, flying back and forth along the King's Gap/Michaux State Forest border. She keeps us on our toes as we run around, trying to figure out where she is off to. Several times she has completely ditched us, only to show up back at near the banding station at King's Gap.

After flying around for several hours, presumably hunting, she often settles down for several hours and gives us some time to relax and enjoy the night sounds other than our feet crunching the newly fallen leaves.

Isra often stays relatively still until shortly before dawn, when she starts flying again and soon ends up in the pitch pine where she will roost for the day. As the sun comes up, we get to go search for the roost site so we know where to find her the following evening.

Mornings are great at King's Gap because there are steady streams of migrating birds flying around. Currently, American Robins steal the show but grackles and juncos are also common in large flocks.

Wet, wet, wet - dry! - wet, wet...

The weather's really been against us this season, as one wet system after another has squatted over the Northeast. This has been especially true for weekends, meaning that most of the groups scheduled to visit the banding stations have either had to cancel, or sit through damp, owless evenings.

We have had some bright spots. Last Sunday night, Oct. 25, conditions were nearly perfect. A cold front had passed through the night before with wind, rain and a lot of falling leaves, but the 25th was cold and calm, with only a half-moon's worth of light. I was running our Hidden Valley site, and after empty nets at the first check, the owls started coming fast and furious, seven or eight at a time. By the time we closed up at 2:30 a.m. we had 24 new saw-whets. In all, we're at about 150 owls for the season - a slow start that puts us behind the average count for this date.

One of the most exciting aspects of our work is the capture of an owl that someone else banded - a foreign recap, of which we've had seven already this year. One of those was an interstation recovery from our own project, a saw-whet banded as a second-year female by Jan Getgood at her home near Hummelstown Nov. 9, 2005, and recaptured on Oct. 20 of this year at our Small Valley site - five-year-old owl, a very respectable age for a saw-whet. (The new longevity record for the species, just set this week by a saw-whet banded and recaptured in Trinity, California, is 9 years old.)

Among the other recoveries whose origins we know were owls captured at King's Gap this month originally banded in Hilliardtown Marsh, ON in 2007; Shirley's Bay, ON, last fall; and the Mohonk Preserve in southeastern New York in 2008. One owl recaptured at Small Valley was banded in Brockway, PA, by Keely Roen's Penn State group last November.

Two of our owls have likewise been reported elsewhere - a Hidden Valley bird from 2007 recaptured at Villa-Marie, Quebec, and a 2008 Hidden Valley owl at Shirley's Bay, ON.

The telemetry work has been a slow push as well for Drew, Kim and Hannah, who are doing yeoman's work under trying circumstances. The weather hasn't helped, and neither has Isra, the saw-whet we're currently tracking - an owl with a talent for leading the crew all over creation, then settling down in the one part of South Mountain designed to confound a radio signal.

Typical was the other night - no matter where Kim positioned herself, she couldn't get a good bearing on the bird, who kept moving around so that Hannah and Drew up on top of the ridge likewise had to keep shifting to new locations. Meantime, Drew was watching on his smart phone as a large area of rain was sweeping in the from southwest. About 4 a.m. it started to drizzle, but it looked from the radar as though the rain would miss them.

Not really. Instead, they found themselves in a driving downpour, slogging 20 minutes back to the car through dripping vegetation. "One of those nights," Drew said later, "but at least we got two extra hours of sleep." Ah, the glamor of wildlife research.

If you're in central Pennsylvania this weekend, be sure to join us for the annual Halloween Owls program at the Ned Smith Center, starting at 7 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 31. We'll be running nets to catch saw-whets (weather permitting), and our good friends from the Shaver's Creek Environmental Education Center will be there with a variety of live owls. It's always fun, and very kid-friendly.

Slow going

The banding stations have been open for a week, but in that time we've netted just a single saw-whet, caught Oct. 5 at our Hidden Valley site - one of the slowest starts we've had in the 13 years we've been studying owl migration.

Part of the reason may lay with the relatively mild, windy, showery weather we've had here in the mid-Atlantic, but I suspect even more of the problem lies to our north - a series of storms that have paraded across southeastern Canada, slowing down the migration.

However, there's a dramatic change in the weather coming over the next few days, with an Arctic air mass plunging down through the Great Lakes and East, with predictions of snow downwind of the lakes and on the higher elevations of New England. We're expecting this cold snap to generate the first good push of owls in our region, perhaps as early as tonight.

Meantime, our radio-telemetry crew has been focusing its attention on the screech-owl we tagged last month, and they're taking a weekend off after six nights of triangulation. Skreech, as they nicknamed the bird, has been hunting the western side of King's Gap State Park and adjacent portions of Michaux State Forest, moving around frequently enough to keep Drew, Hannah and Kim on their toes. Once we start getting saw-whets, they'll switch their attention to them, but we'll continue to keep track of Skreech in the weeks ahead, too.

Skreech and the full moon

"Skreech," the first of this year's owls to be radio-tagged. (©Hannah Panci)

Poets, lovers and songwriters like full moons. Owl researchers, not so much.

For whatever reason, the number of owls caught drops dramatically during a full-moon period, which may explain (along with the lovely, mild weather) why we're 0 for 4 with saw-whets - having opened our 2009 banding operation four nights ago, we still have yet to net our first saw-whet owl.

This isn't unusual - it's often pretty slow the first week of the season, and the migration doesn't peak until about Halloween. In each case, though, the crews at our three sites had plenty to divert to their attention, even in the absence of owls. At Hidden Valley Saturday night there was a fireworks display in the valley, while at Small Valley (where the caretaker has been seeing three large black bears) the volunteers were just glad nothing went bump in the night.

At King's Gap, we actually did catch an owl last week - not a saw-whet, but I'll let Hannah Panci, one of our research interns, pick up the story:

"Meet our red-morph eastern screech-owl (a hatch-year bird, sex unknown), given a gangster name of “Skreech.” After many tries over the course of three nights, Scott, Drew, Kim and I managed to lure it into the net last Wednesday night. Fitted with the newest model of radio transmitter backpack, it was released, and our little research team tracked it until 3 am. We found it again yesterday, sneakily roosting in the open about 30 feet off the ground. We’ll be tracking Skreech throughout the fall, both as telemetry practice and to see how its movements may affect any tagged saw-whets we are following. So look for more updates!"

That's Hannah's photo of Skreech, which we aged as a hatching-year bird - meaning it was born earlier this year, and is entering its first winter - by looking at its feather molt, and the pattern of pale scalloped markings on its primary wing coverts, among other clues. Unlike the migratory saw-whets, we're expecting Skreech to stay fairly close to its banding site on top of South Mountain, although as a young bird, it may still be drifting about, trying to establish a permanent territory. Once it does, though, the bird should sink down roots and stay put for the rest of its life.

Reptilian preview

Trying its best to be unseen, a timber rattlesnake trusts its camouflage. (©Scott Weidensaul)

Yes, I know this blog is about owl research...so why is that timber rattlesnake staring at you?

Last week, our 2009 research crew arrived and started training - and part of their training regimen was two days of radio-tracking rare timber rattlers on South Mountain, the same area where they'll be tracking owls. Last Thursday morning we joined state DCNR biologist Aura Stauffer (also a longtime volunteer member of our banding crew) to seek out several of the rattlers that the state tagged with implanted radio transmitters this summer.

Eastern timber rattlers have been on the ropes for years, with habitat fragmentation and persecution sadly reducing the population of this shy, docile reptile in Pennsylvania, to the point where it's a candidate for state endangered species listing. (There's more information about their ecology and status here.)
The South Mountain population is especially threatened, surrounded as it is by a sea of agriculture and development.

Aura led research tech Drew Weber, interns Hannah Panci and Kim Romano, me and my 15-year-old nephew Connor (who has helped with our banding and tracking since he was little) up into the rain-damp woods. Hannah, who is new to telemetry, took the receiver and yagi antenna, and with Aura's help directed us up through thick oak and pine woods with a dense understory of mountain laurel. This late in the season, Aura was expecting the snakes to move from their foraging areas to near their hibernacula - the winter den sites whose locations are unknown, and a major focus of the study.

The signal beeped more and more loudly, and Aura announced that we were getting close. Although we were all (except Aura) wearing bite-proof leggings, we watched our feet, while Aura used her snake hook to knock down some greenbrier vines. We paraded single file uphill, but just as Hannah stopped, turned, and said, "I think we walked past it," Connor gasped and pointed at Drew's feet.

The rattler, a large dark-morph male, was less than a foot from Drew - but typical for the species, it never rattled or showed the slightest aggression. Neither did the next one we tracked, which was a few hundred meters away, or a third that Kim found around lunchtime, a stunning yellow-morph female (above) curled up in the sun in a recent timber cut, even when I was lying two feet away for a better camera angle. Aura's stepped directly on rattlesnakes a few times and not been bitten. If only people showed as much tolerance for rattlers as the snakes do for people.

The highlight of the day, however, was the last stop, a small rock field deep in the woods. Walking in while Drew tracked the signal, I all but stepped on an untagged rattlesnake that did give a warning buzz as it slid down a chipmunk hole. Then we began to walk carefully up the slope of the rocks, where Aura pointed out five or six females and 14 newborn babies, known as neonates.

Suck rock fields are rookeries - sites where gravid females gather all summer to bask in the sun, not eating, only moving from sun to shade to keep their internal temperature perfectly balanced for the growing embryos. Then each female gives birth to about half a dozen babies around Labor Day, and the family remains together for a short while.

Only a few weeks old, a baby rattler surveys a hostile world (©Scott Weidensaul)

Rookery rocks are one place where rattlesnakes buzz more often than not, and the rocks were alive with the cicada-like rattles. The adult females slid underground quickly, just poking out to look at us, but the babies were curious, sometimes coming closer for a better look.

The reproductive cycle of the timber rattlesnake is glacial. A female mates one year, gives birth the next, and may have to take a year or two off before mating again to rebuild her energy reserves. A Pennsylvania rattler may only reproduce a couple of times in her life, and at the northern edge of their range, in the Adirondacks and southern New England, she may get only one chance to give birth.

Knowing the odds arrayed against this quiet, badly misunderstood species, it was a special privilege to see so many rattlers in one day, including a new generation facing an uncertain future.

Gemini and Maria: "flew the coop?"

Right: Carl searching for Gemini near Tom's Run (Photo: Carl Leinbach)

Below: Lexi barely visible in a pitch pine

Yesterday, I went out tracking with volunteer Carl Leinbach to find Lexi's roost location. Carl and his wife, Pat, live nearby, and have been faithful volunteers for the entire season.

Mainly, they joined us for night-tracking, running around the woods and helping us chase down owls. It was great to have their company and help, and I will greatly miss working with them!

This was the second time Carl joined me on a roost check. A few months back, we tracked Quasi to a pitch pine, and documented it as her second use of the same tree. Lexi was again roosting towards the Buck Ridge, so we trekked up the steep slope that we have hiked more times than we can count in the last four months. We were having a few receiver problems, and ended up switching between 2 receivers to locate the owl (we think that the cold temperatures were interferring with the transmitter on the owl, the receivers, or both).

To get above the owl, we hiked higher than we needed to; it is easier to locate an owl starting out from a higher elevation than the owl to avoid the signal bouncing off the walls of a steep hollow, and being inhibited by the "shelves" that make up the slope. As we approached the area where we figured the owl should be, based on our readings from farther away, the signal faded away, as did the "bars" on the receiver (the signal from the owl's transmitter comes in as a "pulse" through the receiver, and this pulse can be monitored by sound, or visually through bars that continually fluctuate based on signal strength).

We were about to give up, when we both decided to start searching a nearby pitch pine. I was extremely doubtful that we would find her, but sure enough, we saw her little round body shining in the sun almost 60 feet up in a pitch pine. Thanks again to Carl for helping me hunt her down!

Next, we set out to track Gemini, who has taken up residence for over a month near Pine Grove Furnace State Park. There were no "beeps" to be heard anywhere near her usual haunts by Tom's Run. I last noted she was present on the 18th, and it is likely she left the area in anticipation of the few inches of snow that fell on the 19th. Maria also seems to be gone, and has not been located in her typical area since the 13th. The owls may have found a nearby hollow to roost in, or may have moved on further south, continuing their migrations. We will spend the next few days trying to relocate them.

Lexi's unusual roosting habits

Above: Lexi roosting on a dead branch (Photo: George Gress)

Left: A typical chestnut oak/pitch pine dominant roost location (Photo: George Gress)

On January 19th, I was joined by volunteer George Gress to track down Lexi. We found her near her usual roost locations, but this time closer to the bottom of the slope of the Buck Ridge. We found a very fresh pellet (at 10:30 am in the morning) underneath the pitch pine that Lexi was roosting in. Typically, saw-whets will find a clump of pine cones or needles on a dense branch to roost in, but today Lexi was completely exposed on a dead branch about 2 feet from the main trunk of the tree (see above pictures). Usually, it takes a few minutes of searching in a tree that you detect an owl in to get a visual, but as we were passing by her tree, George looked up and said "There she is!" Thanks to George for helping me find her and sharing his great photos!

Tracking back in gear!

It was a wet and soggy day in Michaux State Forest yesterday, the kind of day that makes you really appreciate your rain gear, although, it wasn’t exactly raining. A snow storm dumped around 6 inches of heavy wet snow on the ground Tuesday night, and the warmer temperatures Wednesday morning resulted in the woods turning into a soggy mess as the snow melted. I tracked down Gemini to a tree less than 20 feet away from the tree it (remember, Gemini is an “unknown”) used the previous day. On both occasions, I could not get a visual on it, as the owl was at least 40 feet up in the dense white pines. Today, it was in another nearby white pine. At first, I could not see the owl in the dense branches, but as I stepped back about 20 feet to take a reading on my clinometer (an instrument used to measure the height of trees), I saw the classic “fuzzball” shape about 50 feet up in the branches.

Scott and Aura spent their time yesterday searching for Lexi and Maria. Lexi has been in the dense mountain laurel patch that Andy and Quasi spent much time at. Maria has been a little more challenging to pinpoint, but is somewhere near the Buck Ridge slope, possibly close to where Autumn used to roost. Aura is out again today trying to locate her, because she can’t hide forever with a transmitter on her back!

This weekend will bring more unwelcomed winter weather to the area, so we may have to postpone our night-telemetry. We are confident our owls will stick around, though, since they appear to be wintering here.

Cold going

Anna Fasoli, Drew Weber and the telemetry volunteers have been spending a lot of time in the dark, cold and snow lately. Anna and Drew did four nights in a row, Sunday through Wednesday, a period that included lows in the 20s, high winds and some blinding snow squalls. They had been tracking Quasi, a saw-whet we tagged on Oct. 25 and which had been extremely cooperative, staying within upper King's Gap Hollow every night.

We knew the good times couldn't last. Tuesday night I joined Anna and Drew, along with telemetry volunteers Pat and Carl Leinbach, hoping to double up on Quasi and a new owl we'd tagged Sunday night named Sacagawea. At dusk we had both their signals, but as we split into three teams for triangulation, both owls started moving to the southwest.

Quasi just kept on going, moving steadily southwest until we lost her signal. Drew managed to relocated Sacagawea, however, in Michaux State Forest about two miles to the southwest, and we tracked her movements until after midnight.

One highlight was hiking to the boundary of King's Gap Park and the state forest, with snow flurries falling and the wild whooping cries of hundreds of tundra swans passing overhead in the darkness - birds that were en route from northern and western Alaska to the Chesapeake Bay.

I can't begin to express my admiration for Anna, Drew and the rest of the crew -- it's been bitterly cold up on the ridges, standing for hours in the snow and wind taking bearings every 10 minutes.

Anna found Sacagawea's roost during the day Wednesday, still in the same general area, then that night she, Drew and Jen Smetzer tried to track her. Unfortunately, the owl moved down off the ridge into an area of private land, and when they tried to find positions from which to get good bearings, they were hassled by the owner of a nearby home, who was understandably suspicious of people with glowing spots on their foreheads waving metal antennas. So they shifted back up into the state forest, making the best of a weak signal -- enough to show them that Sacagawea didn't move far.

While the tracking has been going well, the banding has been dismally slow. Since the big cold front came through Sunday things have picked up a little bit, with nine new owls, but it's been a hard slog for the banding crews, especially at our unheated sites, Hidden Valley and Small Valley.

We did set up a new net array near the banding site at Hidden Valley, playing a combination of long-eared owl and boreal owl calls -- we'll see if my backyard capture of the long-eared was a fluke, or if we should expand our project to focus as well on these poorly understood birds.

Night tracking in full swing

For the past 3 nights, the tracking team has been roaming the woods of King's Gap State Park keeping tabs on our 2 owls, Quasi and Morticia.

On saturday night, we were joined by Ann Rhoads and her grandson Ben. We started at the Pond Area parking lot, while Drew braved the dark night alone and headed upslope towards Quasi. Quasi did not venture far from her roost area, and stayed relatively close to both teams the entire night, never making any drastic moves. She was making enough movements to ruin our angle on her, so we moved around a few times in an attempt to maintain a good angle. As the night went on, a cold front moved through, causing us to do what Ben called "the dance of winter" to keep warm. About half an hour before ending, Drew heard a saw-whet call in our general direction, which very well may have been Quasi.

On sunday night, we were joined by volunteers Kim Mihalek and Jennifer Smetzer, and also Scott's nephew Conner. We kept tabbs on both Quasi and Morticia, and managed to stay in ideal locations that gave us an excellent angle on the owls locations. This night was colder yet, and Jen implemented the "funny walk contest," which was not only a way to keep warm, but a fantastic form of entertainment!

Last night, we were joined by volunteers Pat and Carl Leinbach, and Phil Witmer. This time, we again started from the top of Buck Ridge, and worked our way down. Phil and Drew ventured down slope, while Pat, Carl, and I stayed on the upper part of the slope. Both Quasi and Morticia were in range, but they were not as cooperative as the previous night. Regardless, we were still able to get intersecting lines after moving positions a few times. This was the chilliest of the three nights, with temperatures dropping to 29 degrees! It felt even colder with the wind. We stayed warm by jogging in place and taking short trips back up the hillside.

Stay tuned for night activity maps for the owls we've been tracking each night. We will head out again tonight, our last night of the week. As Scott mentioned, we'll be planning a few "all-nighters" to see what the owls are doing until dawn. As always, if you are interested in helping out, please email me at annafasoli@gmail.com.

Thanks to all the volunteers who have been coming out with us, driving from afar, and continually braving the cold temperatures. We really couldn't do it without you!

Quasi's mid-day snack

It was an unseasonably warm day for tracking yesterday. The warm weather brought out mosquitos and gnats, and as usual, the ticks were out in full force. We have two owls remaining at King's Gap, Morticia and Quasi. Autumn and Fairfield seem to have left, although we still have hope they might show up on a future search. They may be hiding in a hollow somewhere just out of the 1/2 mile range of our receivers.

I looked for Quasi first. As I was narrowing down the tree she was in, just outside the King's Gap boundary, my receiver batteries started to weaken, so I stopped to change them. After putting in a fresh set, I looked up, and there was the fuzzball of Quasi high up in the pitch pine I was standing near. An important part of tracking is following the signal, but the key is looking up, because sometimes the owls are just as clear as day. Or, in the case of most owls that are very well hidden, the key is looking down to the ground for signs of an owl, including whitewash and pellets. Directly underneath Quasi I saw whitewash, but came up short on a pellet search. Upon looking at Quasi with my binoculars, I saw the long thin tail of a mouse hanging beneath her. I snapped a few photos to get a better look at the lifeless body she clutched in her talons. Because Quasi was about 50 feet up, the closest photo I could take with my camera is slightly blurry, but you can make out the tail and the body of the mouse in the photo above.

Quasi could not be bothered by me at all at this height, and didn't look down at me once. Because of the angle of the branches, the best shot was directly underneath her, which provided a good view of the mouse. She never started eating the mouse, which is sometimes the case, and she still held onto it when I was done with data collection.

I checked on Morticia next, who has been favoring the leaf cover of oak trees. I found her in a large chestnut oak east of the Pond Day Use area parking lot. I found whitewash, but she remained concealed the entire time.

The tracking team will be headed out tonight through wednesday to monitor the activitiy of these owls at night. Last weekend, we started out tracking Morticia, who turned out to be incredibly active, jumping from hollow to hollow, while Quasi remained in only one hollow. We are unsure if either of these patterns are usual behaviors for saw-whets, and we'll need to spend many more nights in the dark to find out!

Drip, drip, drip...

The weather has been as unseasonably mild this week as it was unseasonably wintry last week, and it's not helping the cause much. We've been back to a slow drip of birds - 10 owls on Sunday night, six on Monday night, and just two on Tuesday, when King's Gap had to close at 7:30 p.m. because of rain, and Small Valley a few hours later. Only Hidden Valley was able to put in a full night, and they had just one bird.

Quasi and Morticia remain on or around King's Gap State Park, and Sunday night Anna, Drew and several volunteers were able to track them. They started with Morticia, who moved all over the map and eventually out of radio range; at that point, the teams started tracking Quasi, who stayed closer to her roost area for the next several hours.

Sunday night at Hidden Valley we had a large group of visitors from Audubon Pennsylvania, the state office of The Nature Conservancy, the Academy of Natural Sciences and several land trusts. The TNC folks have posted video from the visit here, including the banding process.

The weather looks pretty poor for the next few nights, with showers and rain in the forecast through the weekend. We're keeping our fingers crossed, since this is usually our best week, and we have a lot of visiting groups on the calendar.

A windy night for Quasi

Tonight, convenience was the word. Drew and I arrived at King’s Gap around 6:30 to track either Autumn or Quasimodi (Quasi for short), the plump new owl we put a transmitter on last night. Autumn was at her usual location about 1 mile south west of the Pond Area, while Quasi was roosting in the south east section of King’s Gap Hollow. We chose to track Quasi, hoping she would stay in the vicinity of King’s Gap to use the roads to our advantage. Initially, it appeared as though Quasi moved north east of her roost a short distance of about .2 miles. As Drew and I figured out the best locations to biangulate by 8:00 pm, she seemed to move slightly down slope and to the west, just a few hundred meters from her roost location. For the next few hours, Quasi was quite boring to track. In the world of owls, this translates to catching, tearing in half, eating, and digesting a mouse. We noticed slight fluctuations in the location of her signal during this time (through midnight), but this may have been attributed to the gusty winds. Wind can move the trees between trackers and the owl, including the branch the owl is on, causing these fluctuations, despite a lack of movement by the owl off her branch. The movements were so small that we had no way to distinguish them between (slight) real owl movements, and interference from wind. However, we can make a good assumption that Quasi was not actively hunting at the time, and most likely had a mouse.

Because Quasi did not move very far away, Drew and I were able to track from the comfort of our vehicles. The curves of King’s Gap road allowed us to surround her while being able to stay on the road, to use an angle of about 90 degrees to pinpoint her location. This is the first night we’ve tracked from our vehicles. On our other night time adventures, we trudged through the woods to find the best vantage points. While both methods work the same, I must admit that sitting in a vehicle alone is slightly more appealing that sitting in the woods alone. Even better, I was able to plot our readings on my computer to see how they were intersecting. At around 11:00 pm, Quasi had still not moved, so we triangulated her position. This is similar to a biangulation, but instead of just two readings from two different locations, we added another. I drove to a third location shortly after we simultaneously took the first two. Because Quasi was not moving at the time, this worked well, and we were able to get a more exact location on where she had been chowing down on her mouse. We’ll head out again tomorrow night with a few new volunteers to see what Quasi or the others are up to.

Susan Klugman and Karl Kleiner relocated Fairfield today in Michaux State Forest. We had previously thought she left when we didn’t find her 2 days ago at her favorite mountain laurel patch. Now we’ve got 3 beeping owls in the area, which will give us many good options for night tracking over the next two nights.

Miss Fairfield is ready for her close-up

I'm a bit behind with this, since Anna's already posted her tracking report for the day, but yesterday was also a good day for tracking owls - even with a TV crew in tow.

On Tuesday Aura Stauffer, Anna and I, along with King's Gap park director Scott Hackenburg, took Rob Dixon of WHTM-27, the ABC affiliate in Harrisburg, out to find Fairfield.

While we were grateful that our two tagged owls were still around, I'm sure Rob and his cameraman were wishing the one we picked to track hadn't been playing hard-to-get, since Fairfield was hanging out in the same dense laurel thicket just over the line in Michaux State Forest she's been so fond of lately. We thought from the signal she'd moved down the mountain, but it was actually a long climb for them, lugging a huge video camera and 40-pound tripod (which Scott H. carried most of the time).


Aura explains why sane people follow small owls (©Scott Weidensaul)

Anna and Aura were doing the tracking, thrashing through the 10-foot-high laurel. Aura, waving her yagi antenna, had just said, "She's got to be right here somewhere," when Anna, about 10 feet away, gasped and pointed - basically at Aura's head. In between the two women sat Fairfield, at head-height in a laurel thicket.

The cameraman got some terrific footage of her, and Rob's report aired a few hours later. You can see the video here.


Rob Dixon, reporting from one place he (and his cameraman) probably never thought they'd wind up. (©Scott Weidensaul)


Fairfield, who must be getting used to the attention (©Scott Weidensaul)

Aura, collecting data the only way you can in this kind of stuff -- completely prostrate. We will do pretty much anything for this project. (©Scott Weidensaul)

Settling in

Today, I set out with Alex, a dedicated telemetry and banding volunteer, to find our two King's Gap owls, Autumn and Fairfield, who are still residing in the area. Both have really "settled in" to specific areas. We found Fairfield very close to the area she has been using since October 19th, so it was no surprise that we had to fight through the mountain laurel bushes yet again. As I narrowed down the search to a small area with the telemetry equipment, Alex scanned the tall pitch pine in the center of the area, and quickly spotted her. As usual, she had spotted us first, and was staring down at us. This time she was about 50 feet up in a pitch pine, unlike yesterday, when she was just 5 feet off the ground in a moutain laurel!

Next, we headed towards Autumn's location, about one mile west of Fairfield's roost. On sunday night, Drew and I tracked Autumn for 5 hours, along with volunteers Alex and Mark, who had helped us track Dizzy while she was at Weiser State Forest. This was our first night of tracking at King's Gap this year, and it went very well. Autumn stayed within about 1/2 mile of us, as we positioned ourselves on the two hillsides that surrounded the hollow she seemed to be focusing activity in. As with Dizzy, we had problems with signal bounce, but were still able to see periods of movement, and periods of rest. We ended around 11:30 pm. By the next morning, Autumn had settled in about 1/2 mile west of the area she focused her night time activity in. Drew and I pinpointed her location, but just couldn't get a visual on her in the extremely tall red maple tree she decided to roost in. Today however, Alex and I found her with no problem. Before I could even pinpoint the tree she was in with the telemetry equipment, Alex had spotted her about 35 feet up in a pitch pine, her tail feathers just visible in the fork of a branch. Alex observed her picking at her transmitter briefly, but everything looked to be in place as she sat contently in the tree.

So far, both of our owls have been incredibly cooperative, and are settling in quite well at their "favorite" spots. We plan to do night telemetry this sunday, monday, and tuesday nights, depending on the weather. From this we will be able to see how these owls' roost locations compare with their activity ranges at night, something we hope to learn much more about this season.

Trading Places

Fairfield -- no, really it is. (©Aura Stauffer)

The old real estate adage tells us it's "Location, location, location." Must be the same for saw-whets, because our two radio-tagged owls have shown a startling fondness for the same spot, out of the huge area encompassed by King's Gap State Park and Michaux State Forest.

Last week we radio-tagged two female saw-whets, which we nicknamed Autumn and Fairfield. Friday morning, research tech Anna Fasoli found Autumn roosting very close to our banding station on top of the mountain, while Fairfield was down the slope near one of the day use areas, perched in a grove of white pines.

All well and good. The following day, King's Gap coordinator Gary Shimmel and telemetry guru Aura Stauffer headed out to check on the birds. Sure enough, they got a strong signal from the day use area, and found that Fairfield had moved across the road into a chestnut oak. The other owl was higher up the mountain -- more about her in a sec.

Then on Sunday, it was my turn to do daytime roost tracking, and once again, I found Fairfield at the day use area...but when, after collecting all the habitat and vegetation data we need, I double-checked the transmitter frequency, I discovered we'd been making a mistake the past two nights. The owl sitting in the pine trees wasn't Fairfield, it was Autumn -- they'd switched places.

In fact, the pine that Autumn was in was less than 15 feet from the one Fairfield had been using two days earlier. Was this merely some weird coincidence, or is there something that makes a particular grove of pines - out of uncounted pines in the area - attractive to a saw-whet owl? That's one thing we're investigating.

The real Fairfield was roosting Sunday about three-quarters of a mile away, in a hellishly thick mountain laurel jungle on the side of a rocky slope; the last 30 yards I basically followed the radio signal on my hands and knees. She was perched in a half-dead pitch pine, but the day before, Gary and Aura had found her nearby, perched just a few feet off the ground in mountain laurel.

As with most saw-whets, Fairfield was amazingly easy to approach, as the photos show.



Gary Shimmel and Fairfield (Gary's sitting on the ground) (©Aura Stauffer)

After collecting the habitat data for the site, Gary simply picked up Fairfield, checked to make sure her transmitter harness wasn't causing any problems, and returned her to the perch. Nor is this the first time we've been able to pick up a tagged saw-whet when it's perching low; they are a famously docile and naive species.



(©Aura Stauffer)

On the banding front, we had a pretty good night Sunday. I was banding at Hidden Valley, and my crew had 11 new saw-whets and a local recap, which delighted the visiting Briar Bush Nature Center folks from near Philadelphia. Only two saw-whets at Small Valley, but another six at King's Gap.

Anna, research intern Drew Weber and a couple of volunteers did night-tracking of Autumn Sunday night, but I'll let them post about.

King's Gap first 2008 telemetry owls

Yesterday I located our two owls that were equipped with radio transmitters by Aura Stauffer Thursday night at King’s Gap. The first was roosting in a white pine just off a trail that leads to the Pond Area from the parking lot. A nearby group of children from Fairfield Middle School left just as I spotted her, but not before Kim of the DCNR staff at King’s Gap explained to them that I was tracking a very small secretive owl. Stephanie, also of the DCNR staff at the park, suggested we name the owl “Fairfield” after the school group. As I was collecting habitat data on Fairfield, she dozed in and out of sleep, and sometimes watched me intently. Again, as with Dizzy, I witnessed an aerial attack on the owl. It started with one small chickadee, and soon, at least 25 songbirds descended on Fairfield for about ten minutes. This is something the owls must get used to when they pick a more visible roost location.

From Fairfield’s location, I heard the faint “beep” of our second owl. I headed up King’s Gap Road, and didn’t have to go far to narrow down her location. She was less than a quarter of a mile east south east of the net lanes on the steep south facing slope of the hillside in a very tall pitch pine. It was a brisk fall day, so I named this one “Autumn.” She was much higher up than that last owl, and barely looked at me as I circled her.

Hopefully these two new birds will stay in the area long enough for us to collect data about both their roosting locations and their night time activity ranges at King’s Gap.

Dizzy still in area

It was another unusually warm autumn day at Weiser State Forest yesterday as I set out to locate “Dizzy,” the saw-whet we caught October 5 at Small Valley. I did not pick up her signal near the Small Valley banding station, where she roosted on October 7, so I drove northeast through the state forest towards her last known roost location.

On October 11, Scott and I located her on roost just north of Wolf Pond Road. Today, I drove past this location to a nearby vantage point. I did not pick up a signal north over the valley, so I headed back to where I came from. As a turkey ran out in front of me, I stopped the vehicle, which decreased my background noise just enough to hear the faint “beep” of Dizzy’s transmitter off in the distance through my roof antenna. I hooked up my receiver to my folding “handheld” antenna, which indicated Dizzy was southeast of me.

I found her soon after at the top of a black gum tree, just three quarters of a mile east north east of her previous roost location on October 11. I couldn’t actually see her, but her signal was localized in a raptor nest about 30 feet off the ground. Saw-whets have used similar abandoned nests for roost locations in the past, but according to Scott Weidensaul, nothing in the literature suggests this has been observed elsewhere. As I was collecting habitat data, six titmice flew in and were quite upset to find Dizzy, but did not stick around very long. This roost location is about 2.5 miles north east of the Small Valley banding station.

It will be interesting to see her roost movements in the next few days as temperatures drop, which may encourage Dizzy to continue her migration. On the other hand, Dizzy may choose to spend the entire winter in this area. We will continue to monitor her roosting activity as long as she stays in the area, and in the meantime, we will continue to patiently wait for more owls to arrive at King’s Gap. Again, last night the moon was too bright and temperatures were just too warm, and no owls were caught at any of the three sites.