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.

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.

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.

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.