It's been a couple of weeks since we wrapped up the intensive tracking portion of our fall/winter research season (and since I updated this blog), but we still have one radio-tagged owl - Lexi - remaining on the study area. Although we're no longer conducting night-tracking, Aura Stauffer and I have been doing roost checks on her every few days.
Initially, Lexi was staying up in her usual haunts, high in King's Gap Hollow below Buck Ridge, but around Jan. 25 she shifted to the west, sometimes on private land near the park (judging from her signal location), sometimes on park property off the Boundary Trail. Then, after briefly returning to the Buck Ridge area, she made a dramatic move.
On Groundhog Day, Aura located Lexi's signal down in the valley more than three and a half miles from where she'd been roosting, and two days later, Aura and I located her sitting in a plantation of young white pines on private land along Yellow Breeches Creek. This is only a little more than a mile from a riparian woodlot where we tracked her hunting one night last month; maybe she got tired of making the commute. The farmer on whose land she's staying said he sees a lot of raptors there, and we flushed a red-tailed hawk and great horned owl as we hiked in that morning.
I just got back from checking on Lexi again today, and she's still tucked into the same grove of 30-foot-tall pines. I was accompanied this morning by Ohio saw-whet bander Kelly Williams-Sieg and her friend Lisa Ratcliff, who drove up to get some experience radio-tracking. I visited Kelly's terrific banding station in Chillicothe, OH, last winter, and was delighted to repay the hospitality. The fact it finally felt a bit like spring today -- mild temps, singing song sparrows and Carolina wrens, and flocks of ring-billed gulls migrating overhead -- only made the day more enjoyable.
The weather is supposed to stay mild through the first half of the week, and it will be interesting to see what Lexi does. I would expect the first push of northbound saw-whet migration to begin about now, and her move to the valley site might be a sign of pre-migratory restlessness. We'll be keeping an eye on her, and I wouldn't be surprised if she starts moving north in the next week or so.
We've only been able to follow two other saw-whets this late into the winter - a bird we nicknamed "The Grinch" in 2007-08, which we finally lost track of Feb. 2, and an unnamed bird in 2003 whose signal disappeared about Feb. 16 - whether because it migrated, or because the battery died, I can't say. If Lexi hangs in there, she may set a new record for us - but even if she leaves tomorrow, we've amassed a ton of roost and nighttime activity data on her.
Finally, it was farewell and good luck to our fall research technician Anna Fasoli and research intern Drew Weber, who both did such a fantastic job for us this season. Anna's going to be doing some volunteer work with her old love, whooping cranes, in Florida, then helping on some conservation work in Hawaii before starting a new position in Nebraska this spring tracking endangered plovers and terns. Drew, meantime, will be pursuing graduate school in ecology and conservation. We were incredibly luck to have both of them participating in this project, and they'll be missed.
Showing posts with label Anna Fasoli. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Anna Fasoli. Show all posts
Sunday, February 8, 2009
Monday, January 19, 2009
Snowy night
This past weekend we had the worst cold to hit the mountains of central Pennsylvania since 1994 -- it was -8 at our house in Schuylkill County, and only marginally warmer at our South Mountain study site.
It appears that Maria may have left, at least the immediate King's Gap State Park area; ice and snow on the unmaintained state forest roads have made it hard to check whether she's simply moved to a new hollow. Lexi and Gemini remain, though, and Saturday afternoon - when the temp had clawed back above zero -- Anna Fasoli and King's Gap banding volunteers Jane and Maeve Charlesworth tracked down Lexi, high on Buck Ridge.
Last night Anna, new volunteer Lisa Rubin and I met at King's Gap to track Lexi, with snow squalls leaving a fresh coat. Fortunately, the temperature was nearly 30 degrees warmer than it had been the previous morning; in fact, the combination of dead calm and temps in the upper 20s made it one of the most comfortable tracking nights we've had in months - though I am a little nostalgic for swatting mosquitoes back in early October.
We sure got our exercise. What we've tended to see is that the owls leave their roost at dusk, move actively (sometimes covering long distances, as Lexi did last week), but after an hour or two they tend to settle in to one spot, sometimes not moving again for hours. We suspect they're flying from spot to spot until they locate an area with rodent activity, and once they make a kill, they'll plunk down to eat and digest. Because saw-whets usually eat one or two mice a night, we suspect they go through another period of active hunting sometime in the predawn hours, and we'll be looking at that next season, when we begin doing all-night monitoring (in the balmier nights of October and early November, not in subzero January weather).
Last night, though, Lexi didn't settle down. She stayed along the top of Buck Ridge, moving frequently enough that her signal kept fading in an out, and for most of the next six hours we chased her (slowly, carefully, quietly) around the mountain. We'd get into a good position, Anna and Lisa in one place and me several hundred meters away so we had converging angles with our receivers - and the owl would move. And again. And again.
At one point, I moved in several hundred meters with no headlamp, trying not to slip too much on the ice- and snow-covered rocks, when the owl apparently flew in and landed almost on top of me. She did the same thing and hour later, after we'd made an enormous loop and wound up halfway down the mountain near where we started.
It wasn't until 10:30 p.m. that Lexi's signal finally localized near the firebreak in King's Gap Hollow. Whether she 'd just felt the need to stretch, or was having trouble finding prey, she must have found something good. When we left her after 11 p.m. she hadn't budged in more than half an hour, and was presumably enjoying some warm mouse meat.
It appears that Maria may have left, at least the immediate King's Gap State Park area; ice and snow on the unmaintained state forest roads have made it hard to check whether she's simply moved to a new hollow. Lexi and Gemini remain, though, and Saturday afternoon - when the temp had clawed back above zero -- Anna Fasoli and King's Gap banding volunteers Jane and Maeve Charlesworth tracked down Lexi, high on Buck Ridge.
Last night Anna, new volunteer Lisa Rubin and I met at King's Gap to track Lexi, with snow squalls leaving a fresh coat. Fortunately, the temperature was nearly 30 degrees warmer than it had been the previous morning; in fact, the combination of dead calm and temps in the upper 20s made it one of the most comfortable tracking nights we've had in months - though I am a little nostalgic for swatting mosquitoes back in early October.
We sure got our exercise. What we've tended to see is that the owls leave their roost at dusk, move actively (sometimes covering long distances, as Lexi did last week), but after an hour or two they tend to settle in to one spot, sometimes not moving again for hours. We suspect they're flying from spot to spot until they locate an area with rodent activity, and once they make a kill, they'll plunk down to eat and digest. Because saw-whets usually eat one or two mice a night, we suspect they go through another period of active hunting sometime in the predawn hours, and we'll be looking at that next season, when we begin doing all-night monitoring (in the balmier nights of October and early November, not in subzero January weather).
Last night, though, Lexi didn't settle down. She stayed along the top of Buck Ridge, moving frequently enough that her signal kept fading in an out, and for most of the next six hours we chased her (slowly, carefully, quietly) around the mountain. We'd get into a good position, Anna and Lisa in one place and me several hundred meters away so we had converging angles with our receivers - and the owl would move. And again. And again.
At one point, I moved in several hundred meters with no headlamp, trying not to slip too much on the ice- and snow-covered rocks, when the owl apparently flew in and landed almost on top of me. She did the same thing and hour later, after we'd made an enormous loop and wound up halfway down the mountain near where we started.
It wasn't until 10:30 p.m. that Lexi's signal finally localized near the firebreak in King's Gap Hollow. Whether she 'd just felt the need to stretch, or was having trouble finding prey, she must have found something good. When we left her after 11 p.m. she hadn't budged in more than half an hour, and was presumably enjoying some warm mouse meat.
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Wandering wings
Lexi, with a bag lunch (©Anna Fasoli)
What I love about this project is the way the owls keep surprising us -- even if it is occasionally inconvenient.
On Monday the 12th, Aura Stauffer checked on our three tagged owls and found them all pretty much where we'd expected them to be, with Lexi and Maria roosting in the upper reaches of King's Gap Hollow. So that night Anna Fasoli, Drew Weber, Jamie Flickinger and I met to track them, hiking half a mile up to the icy ridgeline to get into good position.
Only owls had other ideas. Maria quickly moved south through the gap and into Cold Springs Hollow, while Lexi zoomed off to the north and west. We decided to chase her, hoofing it back down the mountain, figuring Lexi had shifted to Irishtown Gap Hollow, the next one to the west.
Only she hadn't; there was no sign of her signal. Drew finally located her in about the last place I'd have expected - a small patch of riparian woodland along Yellow Breeches Creek in the valley below South Mountain, a 2.5-mile flight from her roost.
We spent the next five hours monitoring her minor movements within the woodlot, all of us speculating whether the heavy ice on the ridgetop had forced her down, and wondering if she'd remain in the valley to roost the next day.
She didn't. Anna relocated Lexi yesterday, even farther up the side of Buck Ridge than usual, in a dense laurel patch Anna had to crawl into on all fours. This is the first time we've documented a nearly six-mile commute between roosting and feeding sites, a remarkable distance for a small owl.
What's more, Lexi was perched on the ground, holding half a deer mouse leftover from her nighttime hunting, with lots of whitewash on the snow around her. All saw-whets are easy to approach in daylight, but Lexi is unusually tame around us. To get these amazing pictures once she'd finished collecting habitat data, Anna held the camera just an inch or two from Lexi's face (if you look, you'll see Anna's reflection in the owl's eyes).
Concerned Lexi might become fox food if she stayed where she was, Anna poked her gently to make her fly. At first, Lexi simply landed on Anna's backpack, then finally flew a few yards to land up in the laurel.
(©Anna Fasoli)
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