Screeching

With the high winds last night, we had no luck catching any saw-whets at any of the banding sites. The winds were howling at Small Valley but due to the geography of the area, the nets were not affected by the wind. The only owl of the night was a single red-morph Eastern Screech-Owl that we found in the nets during the first net check. I am always amazed at how bright red this morph is.

We don't get very many screech-owls so it is a fun challenge to age them. One thing we looked at last night was the outer primary covert (the feather my thumb is pointing at in the picture below). Because this screech-owl hatched this year (HY), the feather is strongly patterned. Older birds have a less obvious patterning on this feather. The screech-owl was the largest bird I have ever had to hold in the "bander's grip" (picture below) and it was actually too big for the bander to hold in this position.

Another feature we looked at was the age of the flight feathers. Under a blacklight, feathers of the same age turn uniformly pink. More about this effect in a later post, but basically since our screech-owl just hatched this year, all the feathers are the same age.

We ended up closing the nets an hour early because the wind was picking up and starting to blow the nets around as well as drop lots of leaves into the nets.

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.

First push

I had a feeling that the strong northwest winds on Friday, which produced heavy flights of Canada geese and hawks during the day, foretold good things for our banding crews. And sure enough, the winds fell to a frosty calm after dark, producing perfect conditions.

At King's Gap, Aura Stauffer's crew banded four new saw-whets, while at Hidden Valley, Jan Getgood and her crew had eight more NSWOs and a single red-morph eastern screech-owl (EASO). We usually catch a few screech-owls each season, more by accident than anything else, and while they're an interesting change of pace, the banders don't especially like them; unlike well-behaved saw-whets, the EASOs usually defecate freely and repeatedly while being handled, probably as a way of deterring predators. The stuff is slimy, brown and very smelly. "I had three layers of screech owl crap on me," Jan complained in her report.

That brings us to 27 saw-whets for the season. Tonight should be another great night, but unfortunately, two of our sites will be closed -- Small Valley because Girl Scouts are using the camp this weekend, and King's Gap because there's a wedding and reception on the property.

Aura and KG site coordinator Gary Shimmel will be out today looking for Autumn and Fairfield, the two newest telemetry owls. More news as we get it.

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's gone, but new owls are beeping

Well, the change in the weather brought a little improvement in our fortunes - along with a lot of leaves in the nets. Although Small Valley didn't catch any owls, they heard NSWO (that's the banding code for northern saw-whet owl) vocalizing in the woods. Hidden Valley had one (plus a big tear in one of the nets, courtesy of a passing mammal) while King's Gap snagged two new birds, both adult females, and both of which left with radio-transmitters.

That brings us to 15 saw-whets for the season. Last year at this time, during the huge southward irruption of saw-whets, we'd already caught 155 owls, but we're also well below our 10-year average for the date of 50 NSWOs. The warm weather really slowed things considerably, but I'm confident that will now change, since we're looking at blustery northwest winds and nighttime lows below freezing the next few nights.

It's a good thing we have two new birds with radios, because it appears Dizzy has finally flown the coop. Anna Fasoli and I got to Wolf Pond Rd. at 6 p.m., but there was no sign of her signal; we quickly walked in to the old roost site, checked, then split up and drove the middle and perimeter of the whole Haldeman Tract/Broad Mountain/Small Valley/Berry Mountain area without finding her. After Anna and I split up, she continued to track through Clark's Creek Valley and west of the Susquehanna on her way home to Carlisle, but came up empty.

Anna will be out today to locate the new owls' roost in King's Gap or Michaux State Forest, and we'll be doing daytime and nighttime tracking this weekend.

We received news this morning that another of our spring '08 owls was recaptured at a familiar place - Hopkins Memorial Forest in extreme northwestern Massachusetts, at Drew Jones' site run by Williams College. This is a that was banded March 2 at King's Gap, and is the second spring KG bird to show up at Hopkins this fall.

While I was repairing the torn net at Hidden Valley this morning, the woods were full of flocks of migrating robins, the air was full of falling maple and black gum leaves on the stiff breeze, and the sky was absolutely alive with big flocks of Canada geese. Those are all signs that we should see a change for the better in our owl numbers.

Nighttime doings

Dusk in Weiser State Forest (©Scott Weidensaul)



The warm weather has absolutely killed the saw-whet migration, with no birds netted the past three nights. But we're making great progress on our nighttime radio-tracking, thanks to Dizzy, who remains a very cooperative owl.

At dusk Wednesday evening, research tech Anna Fasoli and I met up on Wolf Pond Road in Weiser State Forest, in northern Dauphin County, about half an hour north of Harrisburg, and a few miles north of our Small Valley banding site. Dizzy, who was apparently on or near the same roost she'd used the previous day, was coming off her roost as we headed into the woods at dusk, and for the next hour we followed her as she moved back and forth along a south-facing slope.

We walked back to the cars at 8 p.m. to meet longtime volunteer Alex Lamoreaux, now a freshman at PSU Mont Alto, and his college buddy Mark, and from then until 11:15 p.m. we continued to track Dizzy's movements within a fairly small area east of Wolf Pond Road, along the same slope.

Biangulation was made easier by the presence of a couple of old logging roads that allowed us to bracket her, and made harder by the dense laurel understory, which really blocked a lot of the signal, especially for Alex and me in the downhill spot. But we took bearings on 16 or 17 different locations, usually at 10-minute intervals - the first time we've been able to put our theory into practice, and it worked reasonably well.

We'll be tracking Dizzy again tonight, while Aura Stauffer will be on call to tag one or more new owls at King's Gap this evening, or tomorrow when Aura's banding. Once that happens, we'll probably shift our telemetry focus to Michaux State Forest.

Best of all, I expect that the cold front passing through right now, flinging maple leaves past my office window, will push our first significant flight of owls south. Temps this weekend are supposed to be 20 degrees chillier than yesterday, and that should act like a big push-broom, herding the owls south. We're more than ready.

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.