Blow-out

The huge nor'easter that came roaring through eastern Pennsylvania Tuesday wiped out our banding, since rain, snow and 40-50 mph winds are not conducive to catching owls. Some of the higher ridgetops just north of us got walloped with 15 inches or more of snow.

Besides canceling banding, we'd planned a major night of triangulation tracking, with three teams of trackers and helpers -- all to naught. It was a good night to curl up in front of a fire.

However, despite the rain (and lots of fallen trees and falling branches), research tech Anna Fasoli was out during the day checking on our three radio-tagged owls. She found them all more or less where they'd been the day before, having moved anywhere from 70 to 231 meters.

Here's a sneak peek, though, at what we're working so hard to get this fall -- an evening activity map for Autumn, one of the King's Gap owls we've been tracking, at a previous roost she's long since left. This was from a tracking session from dark until about midnight on Oct. 19 -- the yellow dot shows Autumn's daytime roost, and the yellow X's mark the spots where Anna and research intern Drew Weber were standing, taking bearings on the radio signal from Autumn's transmitter.

The red dots are where the bearing lines intersected, giving the owl's position (the numbers are time markers - 2310 is 11:10 p.m. EST). We usually take bearings about every 10 minutes, and we try to position ourselves so the bearings intersect at roughly 90 degrees, which gives he most accurate position -- but as the owl moves that isn't always possible, and sometimes Drew and Anna were taking bearings almost directly toward each other. Those inaccurate readings aren't included on the map, which is why there are some gaps in the time line.

Still, this gives us a pretty detailed picture of her movements over the course of almost five hours, moving around the oak/black gum/pine forest on King's Gap's southeastern border. There have only been a handful of attempts to get this kind of activity data on saw-whets before -- once in the 1960s in Minnesota, using an automated system to monitor a single saw-whet in a large woodlot, and again with two breeding males in Idaho some years later. Those studies found that the saw-whets were using areas ranging from 115 hectares (about 284 acres) to 159 hectares, but also that one male's core range was only about 27 ha. (about 66 acres).

In rough terms, Autumn's activity area was about 32 hectares, or about 80 acres. This was not her full night's activity range, but probably represents her first main hunting bout, moving around looking for a mouse, then settling down to eat it. But it begins to shed some light on how large an area these birds need to hunt, and what kinds of habitat and terrain they use in doing so.

Bad weather, good friends

An enormous low pressure system moved in the Northeast last night, and in advance of, unexpected rain overspread eastern Pennsylvania around dark, making for a shortened night at all three sites.

Although we managed to net two new saw-whets at Small Valley, and one new bird plus a local recap at King's Gap, we were blanked at Hidden Valley, where the rain came in fairly steadily around 8 p.m., and forced us to shut down at 9:30.

Which was a shame, because we've rarely had such a firmament of banding superstars on hand. Our good friends Bob and Martha Sargent, founders of the Hummer/Bird Study Group, had driven up from Alabama, and Anthony Hill and his wife Carlene were down from their home in Massachusetts. Bob and Martha's crew conduct spring and fall songbird banding at Fort Morgan on the Gulf coast, and have been largely responsible for an extensive network of banders in the East and Southeast (including me) who band western hummingbirds wintering in the region.

Anthony is a master bander who works every summer on Seal Island, Maine, banding puffins, and on Appledore Island, Maine, each spring and fall banding songbirds. He's also been trained to band hummingbirds, and like Bob and Martha, has caught the saw-whet bug.

Despite the weather, we had a nice welcoming dinner for them at Hidden Valley, where my crew (Phil Witmer and Barb Jucker) were joined by Small Valley coordinator Sandy Lockerman and SV crewmember Shirley Hamilton, and my wife Amy. We got wet, but we ate like royalty.

Phil, Sandy, Scott, Bob, Martha, Carlene, Anthony and Amy (thanks to Barb Jucker, behind the camera).

Before the rain arrived Monday, Aura Stauffer managed to track all three of our current telemetry owls. The newest, Quasi, has moved into the southern part of King's Gap park, where she was sitting high in a pitch pine, while Fairfield has moved almost three miles of the southwest, and was in a white pine close to Pine Grove Furnace State Park. Autumn, meanwhile, was right along the King's Gap/Michaux State Forest line, in a chestnut oak growing in a heavy regenerated old clearcut off a logging road, where Aura found a pellet and lots of whitewash - evidence she's used that roost before.

Here's their current locations (note that north is to the upper right corner, the better to fit the locations into the image).


The storm is currently strengthening into a major nor'easter, with predictions of 50 mph wind gusts and several inches of snow at the higher elevations tonight. We were poised to conduct a full-court-press triangulation tonight on one of the tagged owls, but in the interest of everyone's safety, we've canceled both tracking and banding.

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.

A Wet Night

A powerful storm took its time leaving the midstate Saturday, delaying the opening of King's Gap and Small Valley, and canceling banding entirely farther east at Hidden Valley. Nevertheless, we banded one saw-whet at Small Valley and two more at King's Gap, including a second-year female fitted with a radio transmitter. Since she sat hunched in the hand, the crew named her Quasimodo -- "Quasi" for short.

Earlier in the day, research tech Anna Fasoli looked in vain in the downpours for Fairfield, the owl with a liking for laurel tangles. It may be that she's just hidden in some hollow that deflected the radio signals, but it's more likely she left in advance of the storm. Anna was able to locate Autumn, still about a mile and a half southwest of King's Gap in Michaux State Forest.

We're gearing up for three back-to-back nights of triangulation telemetry, which will be challenge with the forecast of high winds tonight, and sharply colder temps the rest of the week. There's also a chance that the cold front might prompt one or both of our remaining tagged owls to leave -- we'll just have to see what happens. Banders Karl Kleiner and Susan Klugman plan to celebrate their wedding anniversary today by roost-tracking both owls, then tonight, Anna and intern Drew Weber will try to follow one of the saw-whets.

Dots on the map

We keep putting along here this fall - no huge numbers, but enough to make it worthwhile to stay up in the cold.

Small Valley was the hot spot last night, with six new owls including another foreign owl. Three new birds at King's Gap, and two more (including an hatch year male) at Hidden Valley, to the delight of 10 visiting schoolkids from the Philadelphia area.

That makes 83 for the season, and if it seems slow, I'd point out that by this date in 2006 we'd caught a grand total of five saw-whets, at all three sites combined. Now that's slow. (Yeah, I know...last year by this date, the big irruption had brought us 282 saw-whets. Such are the realities of studying a cyclical migrant.)

On the tracking front, yesterday Jamie Flickinger checked on Fairfield, who remains in her Impenetrable Forest of laurel on Michaux State Forest, not having shifted much from the past several days. Jamie didn't have a chance to check on Autumn.

There was no information yet on the foreign owl from Small Valley when I reported it online to the Banding Lab today, but we did learn that the foreign NSWO caught Oct. 17 at Hidden Valley was banded by our colleague Glenn Proudfoot exactly a year earlier, Oct. 17 '07, at the Mohonk Preserve in the Shawngunk Mountains of southeastern New York.

We've also had three encounters with our own birds elsewhere this week. On Wednesday night, an owl banded Oct. 18 at Hidden Valley was recaptured at a new banding site near Sperryville (Rappahannock Co.) Virginia, about 170 miles to the southwest, and on the east slope of the Blue Ridge Mountains near Shenandoah National Park. Here's a map showing the distance between the sites.

Such "direct recoveries" within the same migration cycle are always interesting, since they can shed light on flight routes and timing; I wonder whether this bird traveled along the ridge-and-valley system into western Virginia before jumping across the Shenandoah Valley to the Blue Ridge, or if it crossed the valley near Carlisle, PA, and headed down the northern terminus of the Blue Ridge past King's Gap and the Lamb's Knoll saw-whet station in the Catoctin Mountains of Maryland.

Also reported to us were two fall '07 Small Valley birds, one banded 10/10/07 and recaptured near Elkins, VA on Monday night, and a saw-whet banded Oct. 8 '07 and recaptured last night at Drumlin Farm Wildlife Sanctuary near Lincoln, Mass.

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.