Lexi has left the building

Lexi's moved on. (©Karl Kleiner)

Well, all good things must come to an end - and almost four months to the day since we first radio-tagged her, Lexi has left the King's Gap area, presumably heading north to breed.

Since the end of February, she'd been roosting in a small grove of white pines along Yellow Breeches Creek in southern Cumberland County, and every day or two, telemetry coordinator Aura Stauffer's been checking on her. On April 8, Aura was joined by Karl Kleiner, one of our banders who is a professor at York College of Pennsylvania, and two of Karl's students, Katie Kolos and Shawn Fauth, who tracked down Lexi with Karl and Aura's help.

Katie Kolos (left) gets a bearing on Lexi while Aura Stauffer and Shawn Fauth watch. (©Karl Kleiner)

The next day, Aura was back, realizing that with the opening of trout season, Lexi suddenly had lots of company in her streamside retreat. Aura pointed out the owl to a couple of young boys and their father who were fishing the Yellow Breeches. "One of the boys ran over to his mom, who was fishing, and told her he just saw the smallest owl in Pennsylvania," Aura reported. "How cute!"

On Saturday, telemetry volunteers Carl and Pat Leinbach, who helped so much last fall and winter with our nighttime work, checked on Lexi and found her signal right where we expected. But by Easter morning, when Karl Kleiner and Susan Klugman checked, there was only silence, and the Leinbachs found the same later in the day. Aura was out this morning, and she confirmed what we all suspected -- Lexi was finally on her way north.

"After tracking her for four months, I will miss the little bugger," Aura said. "She has given us a lot of interesting information; not to mention a whole freezer full of owl pellets (my Mom would be appalled)."

It's been a remarkable experience to track one bird for so long, and Lexi gave us amazing insights into saw-whet winter ecology and behavior. And who knows? She may end up in our nets (or someone else's) down the road. In the meantime, we all wish her a safe migration and successful first breeding season.

There's an funny coda to this story. Carl and Pat, unwilling to give up, headed out today to try one more time for Lexi's signal in some of her other previous roost areas. They started near the pine grove, then drove toward King's Gap, using the roof antenna on their car. Near the state fish hatchery -- bingo, they got a signal. After some doubling back to confirm, they raced up to King's Gap, got out and hooked up the handheld yagi antenna. Nothing, not even near the hatchery.

Then they drove up the mountain on Cold Springs Road to Ridge Road, and along the top, they got a strong signal again. Pat turned off their Prius, and Carl got out with the yagi. Again, nothing. When they hooked up the roof antenna, again they got a strong signal - and that's when they realized that the electrical system in their Prius was fooling the receiver.

"We were tracking ourselves!" Carl said. "The Prius is a small car, but hardly qualifies as a saw-whet owl."

We couldn't ask for a better, more dedicated crew of volunteers - and now, with our two-month "autumn" research season finally wrapping up after almost seven months, it's time for us to take a rest. Thanks as well to those who've been following this blog - we'll start again come late September, with more banding, telemetry and an even more exciting new project...but we'll have more to say about that come fall, though.

Lexi's Big Day

(©Aura Stauffer)

Aura Stauffer checked on Lexi today, and found her back in her favorite spruce tree; here's a photo of her there last week in that tree, enjoying some early spring sunshine.

And here's a shot of the woman who is often behind the camera - Aura with Lexi, right after giving the young lady a new radio transmitter last week. The photo's courtesy of DCNR botanist Carrie Gilbert, who was kind enough to give Aura a hand in capturing and reharnessing Lexi - you need a minimum of four hands for the job, and while Aura's amazing, there are limits to what she can do alone.

Aura Stauffer and Lexi (©Carrie Gilbert)

A Most Excellent Owl

Lexi, enjoying a mild spring day. (©Scott Weidensaul)

Although I haven't posted an update in a while (I was away much of late February and early March), we're continuing to keep tabs on Lexi, that most obliging of saw-whets, who has broken all our records in becoming by far the latest-lingering telemetry owl in the eight years of this project. The previous late date for a tagged saw-whet was Feb. 21, and we're coming up on a month past that point.

I checked on Lexi yesterday, March 14, as we've been doing every day or so, and found her still roosting in a white pine thicket along Yellow Breeches Creek, about three miles northwest of the ridgetop portion of King's Gap State Park she'd used in December and January.

Last week, Aura Stauffer realized Lexi's radio signal was getting weaker - it had been almost exactly three months since we'd tagged her, and the batteries only have an expected life of 90 days. On Wednesday, Aura took advantage of Lexi's low roost to get a stepladder and hand-grab the little girl - such docility and tameness is typical of saw-whets, and Lexi in particular. Within a short time, Aura had replaced Lexi's radio with a fresh transmitter, so we should be able to keep up with her until she finally decides to head north.

When will that be? Frankly, I'm quite surprised it hasn't happened already. The peak northbound migration is usually around the beginning of March, based on our limited spring netting in years past, and we've had some perfect migration nights with warm temps and southerly winds. On the other hand, Lexi is a young bird, born in 2008, and doesn't have an established territory to which to return; adult birds of most species migrate more rapidly north in the spring than juveniles.

We're continuing to share Lexi with visitors. Last weekend, Aura took the 26 members of the Governor's Youth Sportsmen Advisory Council (who were meeting at King's Gap) to track her, and yesterday I had Hillel Brandes and Doug Miller of Penn State with me. Doug is the co-director of the university's office for remote sensing and spatial information resources, and he has some great ideas of how to combine extremely high-resolution mapping imagery with our telemetry data so we can better understand why the saw-whets are choosing the roosts and habitats that they use.

Take-out Food

Lexi with a snack. (©Aura Stauffer)

Same church, different pew, as they say...Aura checked on Lexi Friday, who was in a larger white pine within the same grove as the past three weeks, although perched only about four feet off the ground.

She was also holding a bag lunch, but for once it wasn't a Peromyscus (white-footed or deer mouse) but what appeared to be a meadow vole. Aura and I had just been talking on Thursday about how Lexi seemed to be targeting Peromyscus, even down in the valley where we'd expect voles to be more common. Maybe she overheard us, or maybe Thursdays are Vole Night at the saw-whet bistro.

A rough neighborhood

For the past two weeks, Lexi has remained in her new digs, in a grove of young white pines on private land along Yellow Breeches Creek, about 3.5 miles from where she spent most of the winter in King's Gap State Park.

Aura Stauffer has been checking her every few days, and although Lexi seems to be switching roost trees every day or so, she is apparently living high on the hog - or the mouse, at least. Aura's collected a lot of pellets, and more often than not, Lexi's been sitting on a mouse that she saved from the previous night's hunting.

But she's obviously not the only owl hunting these woods. The first day we located her there, Feb. 4, we flushed a great horned owl from the pines, and Aura's found fresh great horned pellets, as well as piles of pigeon feathers that may have been left by GHOWs or other large raptors.

Saw-whets are the bottom of the raptor totem pole, and all other Pennsylvania owls, including screech-owls (which weigh twice as much as a saw-whet) may kill and eat them if given the chance. We can only assume that Lexi's careful, and we hope she remains so.

I was a little surprised, given the mild weather last week, that she didn't pull out and begin moving north. The peak spring migration in Pennsylvania seems to be around the beginning of March, although that probably varies from year to year depending on weather and snow cover. We're nearing the latest date that we've ever had a radio-tagged saw-whet remain, so Lexi may be about to set a new record for us.

Down in the Valley...

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.

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.