Young Fluffy

This little fellow, a fledging Western Screech Owl showed up this afternoon out of nowhere.

It was on our neighbor Dave's driveway, and the AT&T man (who was repairing a squirrel-chewed telephone line) put the owlet on a limb and out of harms way.

Neighbor Dave told neighbor Richard, who told me, and I grabbed my camera and snapped these photos.

Seeing a live owl or a young fluffy like this always makes my day.

Wet & Thirsty Raptors

A number of raptors drink, bathe, and hunt in the same pools where the bears do their thing.

Not everyday, like Steller and scrub jays, but now and then.

I have a hunch that the birds seen here use several different pools on different creeks.

Screech owls were by far the most frequent users.

This video covers about 5 months of clips from several pools.

Bat strafes owl

It's not unusual for a bat to glean insects buzzing a mammal.

Occasionally fellow camera trappers in Minnesota photograph bats very close to deer covered with mosquitos, and it's obvious what the bats are doing.

What you see in this video clip however is a little odd.

The pools in this creek are swarming with insects, so there's no reason for the bat, probably a species of Myotis, to hit the owl in the head.

That is, unless something else is going on.

Could the bat be mobbing the owl, the way songbirds mob owls?

Or did it's radar fail?

This is the kind of footage that reinforces my obsession with camera trapping.

If you are curious about nature, get yourself a camera trap.

You'll learn a lot while you are having fun.

Young fluffies

We baited this set for small carnivores of the four-legged warm-blooded variety, and that's what we got.

But in addition a pair of young fluffies showed up and used the rocks as a perch.

They seem to be finishing their molt.

As Hans Peeters remarked in Field Guide to the Owls of California and the West, juvenile western screech owls have a loose-feathered look until they molt into their adult plumage.

It's that young fluffy look that makes immature owls so appealing.

The fluttering sound in the attic

The rescued attic owl in the butterfly net.

[I recently recovered these pictures from a broken hard drive, and this is their story.]


I had dismissed my wife's suspicion that something was fluttering in the attic.

You see, I'm supposed to be the one with better hearing, but she's the one who's always hearing things.

"Listen," she said, "There it is again."

And she was right. Something was fluttering up there.

I got the ladder and a flashlight and climbed up into the attic's furnace-like heat.

There I traced the mysterious noise to a narrow corner where a rather pathetic looking screech owl had become wedged.

It was impossible to reach it.

If you recall Colonel Nicholson's grimy and sodden appearance after his time out in the hot box -- I'm talking about Alec Guinness in Bridge over the River Kwai  -- well, that was me.

Sweating and covered with insulation I crabbed my way down the ladder and stumbled to the sink to rehydrate.

But time was limited -- it was a miracle the owl wasn't yet cooked.

It had to be close to heat stroke.

I returned to the attic with butterfly net, and it was easy work.

The hyperventilating bird had enough strength to flip on its back and grabbed the net with its sharp little mouse squeezers.

Back in the kitchen it looked like road kill, but it guzzled water freely, and I placed the quenched bird in the shade next to the garage.

An hour later it flew to a higher perch where it dozed until dusk.

I think the little guy made it. There were no owl feathers to be found the next morning, 

How did it get in the attic?

It mistook a terra cotta ventilation tube under the eaves for a suitable daytime retreat.

The chicken wire bird-and-bat filter had fallen from the tube earlier that week.

This was the event that launched my winter pastime as a builder of owl boxes.  

Screech done gone and went

Periodically Screech took her midnight constitutional under the eaves.

Gone are the little surprises on the patio.

The redhead won't miss them, but they always gave me a thrill.

Pellets and earthworms on the patio.

Yes, it finally happened.

The screech owl flew the coop. She moved out the night of April 18th.




We grew accustomed to her routine.

In the early evening Screech groomed in the privacy of her nest box; then she would pop up into the nest hole and doze for an hour or so.

She became wakeful a few minutes before takeoff and would then imitate a birdwatcher, jerking her head here and there as if the place was swarming with new life-listers.

As of last week her departure time was around 8:00PM, a little earlier if overcast.

One evening the redhead heard her mate trilling tenderly overhead in the live oak.

My only complaint was that the little bugger hadn't laid any eggs.

So I wrote to Hans Peeters. the owl expert, to ask what was up.

Hans responded:

" . . . normally Western Screech-owl eggs should make their appearance by early April, but we have to be generous and allow an extra week or so. 

There's also the distinct possibility that your box is being used by a non-breeding individual of either sex as a roost site. 

I had such a bird in our yard for several years. 

This owl, however, eventually used another box nearby for raising young while retaining the first chamber for roosting. 

So there are all sorts of possible scenarios. I'm envious, though, of your nest cam."

I'll pull the camera and lengthen the box for better viewing next year.

The other two boxes are a bit far further from the house, and though I'd love to monitor them too, it's a lot of work wiring them for video, and I've heard that remote transmission isn't reliable.

Catching Up

Approaching the Sierra Nevada at +20,000 feet.

Mono Lake was a welcome sight yesterday as we returned from a few days in northern Virginia.

It was a mixed family-and-business visit, the latter being time spent at the Smithsonian Archives researching the history of camera trapping.

Catching the metro to D.C. reminded me of my old days of gainful employment, with one notable exception. Nowadays few commuters read the paper.

I noted that the mental exercise of texting and other forms of cell phone amusement is not the same as reading the morning paper.

You just don't see the limp lower lip in people reading the paper.

But I digress.

Reading the old files of predator man Stanley P. Young once again carried me away to the American southwest of the early 1900s.

But there's just never enough time. You want to stay on track, but there are always these distractions and you don't want to pass up an important lead.

I was searching very specifically for Young's correspondence with a Chicago lawyer named Tappan Gregory who became an avid and highly successful camera trapper, but I was led astray.

There was Young's letter to "Old Wash the Dog" -- a colorful collection of shared memories. . .

"... do you recall the night club you dragged me into whence we witnessed all the possible gyrations of the human anatomy as the dancers danced (or did they?) and, when the music stopped to let the dancers 'cool off a bit', the pause was exemplified by beating the hell out of your table top with a one by six board..."

And in a letter to District Agent Everett Mercer there was this:

"You will recall too that Pancho Villa had me as a prisoner for some time after I was picked up by his outposts while following a wolf dragline mark across the border into Sonora."

Despite these sidetracks and many others I got what I was after, and I was sufficiently jazzed to outline a chapter on the flight home.

We touched down in SF and after a quick midday meal boarded the plane to Chico.

Winter may still have its grip on the Sierra, but spring had arrived in the Sacramento Valley.

A warm wind blew across the Chico airport when we crossed the tarmac.

The first order of business at home was to get Fred, who had been lovingly cared for by the owners of his border collie mother, Roxie.

A dog sure can make you feel good; our reunion was the usual waggle dance with yodeling.

The second order of business was to check up on Screech.

I turned on the TV and the owl is still there, but when it jumped up to the opening at 7:15 yesterday evening no eggs were visible on the floor of the box.

I have been hoping that Screech is a she-bird.

She's very preeny.

I'll just have to keep watching.

And oh yes, I re-posted that photo of the Chukar partridges.

Owl in the box

The blasted cam is TOO CLOSE!

Wet snow was blowing when I checked the screech owl box Saturday evening (March 19), and to my great surprise there was something in the entrance.

It was 6:30 and there was still enough light to glass it with the binocs.

It wasn't a bug-eyed squirrel, but a well-ruffled screech owl with half closed eyes.

The discovery wired me like a couple of double espressos.

This morning I brought the cam cable into the house and hooked it up to the monitor.

The owl was nestled in the wood shavings and saw dust, but damn! the cam's field of view is not what I had expected.

You can only see part of her head and back.

I had tested the cam's field of view in the shop last fall, but now realize I was a bit too generous with the bedding.

Live and learn.

I'll have to make a longer box for next year.

I'll check this evening to see if there are eggs or owlets.

Evader of the snow dump

We had a snow dump last Thursday night.

We were greeted with 14 inches of snow on Friday morning, and it was still coming on strong.

That meant I couldn't get away with just making the fire and disappearing in the computer room the rest of the day.

When the redhead came in the house after an hour of shoveling I thought it prudent to inform her that I was just about to boot up and shake the snow off the trees.

"There's an owl in the Lady Banks' rose," she said, "so you probably don't want to bother it."

I  opened the back door and there it was peeping at me through squinted eyes.

The rest of the day it perched on the trellis under the eaves of the garage, but when the redhead checked at 5:00 it was gone.

It was back on Saturday morning, this time snoozing in the ash tree 15 feet from the house.

 The owl had the wisdom not to sleep under snow-loaded limbs, but what does it all mean?

 Why didn't it make use of the screech owl boxes near by?

I have one box about 40 feet from the house -- newly wired for surveillance, and another one 120 feet from the house, which has been used at least once in the past. 

Is there a girl owl in one of those boxes?  Is this the chivalrous mate?

When the snow melts I'll have to hook up the surveillance cam.

The lesson of an anonymous camera bumper and 3 hooters

When something jars your camera trap it usually ruins the set that you so painstakingly composed.

Consider set # 394 at the Chimineas ranch last month.

My colleagues made the set to capture thirsty carnivores at one end of the pond, and they did a commendable job.

Besides the pleasing image of the buck and doe, the camera also captured one frame of this great horned owl, which I have cropped.

On day 19 of the set something bumped into the camera, and the frame changed from this:

to this:

The camera was then viewing a completely different and limited part of the pond.

This kind of thing has been known to evoke some rather colorful language.

In this case however we discovered that two other species of hooters were visiting the pool in the area less trafficked by deer and coyotes.

There was a single image of the barn owl,

and a western screech owl buzzed about and left 6 images.

It stands to reason that not all species use the same area of the pond.

More from the rock

Now for a few more pictures from that lookout rock used by the gray fox.

The next most common visitor was a western screech owl -- the gray color phase which is more common in arid habitats.

 It made two appearances on June 30 and July 17 and left 12 pictures, one of which contained two owls.

So perhaps two owls were using the perch -- a pair of owls, or maybe mother and offspring. 

The picture in flight looks looks as if it might have been snatching insects from the chamise.

There were also a few visits by Peromyscus.

In very early morning a California towhee and a Bendire's thrasher also perched on the rock.

The notch-eared coyote showed up on August 5th, a few days before we collected the camera.

Gully Cams

A Western screech owl perches near the camera 

but at the edge of the frame where there was no eye shine.

Unless there's a visible bait, sound lure, or water you don't expect owls to come to camera traps. 

Craig set a couple of cameras in or near gullies, which many mammals use as travel lanes.  

He used a punctured can of mackerel under a rock as bait, and a couple of scent lures, none of which should attract owls.

The surprise was that an owl visited each camera. 

 

Western screech owl faces a gully camera. Picture was cropped, 

but bird was close to the center of the frame, thus the eye shine.

You can't rule out the possibility that they were attracted to rodents attracted to the bait. 

Second photo of the owl, after retreating. 

Poison Water guzzlers -- Western screech owl

Unless you are approaching the golden years of codgerdom, you may not remember comedian Jackie Vernon's appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show and his solemn pronouncement --  "A wet bird never flies at night".

Actually Vernon credited philosopher Sig Sakowitz for that gem of wisdom, but he believed it.

And so did I. 

I believed the heavy hand of natural selection had weeded out wet birds that dared to fly at night.

Now I am starting to have doubts.  

You see, it was night -- 9:40PM to be exact -- when this Western screech owl mirrored itself before the still waters of Poison Water Spring. 

Five minutes later it waded into the murky shallows.

 

Okay, it was only a sitz bath, but the camera took two more pictures at intervals of 8 and 16 minutes. 

Which makes me think it was a case of bathus interruptus -- in and out, always on the lookout, and all nervous like girls skinny dipping in the 60s. 

This little joker, a recent fledgling showed up the next night . . . .

. . . . sipped bath water . . . 

and definitely got his or her pantalones wet. 

I can't prove that the birds flew wet into the night, but I doubt they left Poison Water in a state of popcorn dryness. 

Sometimes you have to give up cherished beliefs.

Nowadays I'm inclined to believe that wet birds do fly at night. 

Ne me quitte pas

Despite my best intentions, the screech owl flew the coop. I checked the camera trap today. My rude intrusion was just too much.

This picture was taken at 5:17PM on the same day of my owl debacle. There were two photos of the owl. Obviously it was ready to "get the hell out of Dodge". That was it.

Knowing that the owl was gone, I checked out the box. I had been right. The bad smell was from squirrels. There were bones and baby squirrel fur in the box. Something must have bumped off the mother. No barf balls were to be found.

I find it curious that the owls ignore the flash when they are nesting. The camera trap took hundreds of flash photos last spring when a pair of screech owls nested in a tree cavity not far from here. It seems that once committed, they stick it out despite the camera flash.

It's a let down. The owl box (sigh) is close enough to the house for an owl cam, and I was ready to set one up courtesy of neighbor Richard who loaned the equipment.

I'm not giving up. I went to the hardware store this afternoon. It's time to build some more owl boxes.

Knock knock?

My task today was to move the screech owl box. The stimulus was Owlman's recent post at The Owl Box Blog.

My owl box has been in the same place for two years. If two years pass and an owl doesn't stake its claim the owl pundits advise you to move the box to a new location. A squirrel staked its claim the first year and installed a grass nest with an arched roof.

When we passed the box this morning I threw a rock at it...bonk!

"See? No owl! If there was a screech owl inside, it would be looking out and wondering what the hell is going on." The redhead remained silent, which means she accepted the wisdom of my statement or wasn't listening.

After lunch I climbed the ladder, removed the 2 bunji cords, and clasping the box to my chest started to climb down the ladder. Halfway down I paused to pluck a few gray squirrel hairs from the gnawed entrance.

Yes, I pondered, it was a squirrel, and now it's eviction time.

Noticing that the grass nest was gone, I stuck my nose in the hole and sniffed . . . . the box gave off a sweet fetid odor. Now that's disgusting, I thought. This damn squirrel must be deranged to crap in its nest.

I tipped the box toward the sunlight and looked in the hole . . . and . . . GREAT BALLS OF FIRE!

There was a screech owl inside! It was leaning sideways with one half-opened eye and half-raised ear tufts. It looked like Britney Spears on a bad hair day after a weeklong boogie fest. Of course, the smell wasn't squirrel doodoo. It was the unmistakable stench of an owl's sour barf balls.

"Oh my God. This is an emergency!" I had to get that box back in the tree pronto, and for that I needed the redhead's assistance, immediately.

I stuffed my jacket in the hole, and fetched the redhead, who was about to go to our daughter's house.



"This is an emergency." I pleaded. "If the Fish and Wildife Service finds out I molested the owl, I could go to jail!" The redhead joined me.

We got the box back up, and an hour later I set up a camera trap. It was a rough day.

I hope this owl can forgive and forget.

Squirrel episode at the owl snag

As fledging day approaches the fickle finger of fate continues to thwart my efforts to photograph screech owl fluffies. These are trying times.

I've gotten only 8 photos since last week -- a few blanks and a couple of screech owl butts as the adults entered the nest cavity. Part of the problem has been poor sensor alignment. Then the controller batteries went out, and today the camera batteries were dead.

Last weekend I was convinced that the problem was squirrels. My late afternoon visit began well. It was the first time I saw the male owl in daylight. His 'owl camou' really worked -- dark facial streaks obliterated closed eyes, and his ear tufts were at full mast. He didn't look awake, but I had a feeling he was sleep-faking.

Well that's cool, I thought. If the male is roosting here, the nest hasn't been abandoned.

There were only two pictures on the memory stick, so I raised the camera on the fiberglass pole, and tried to adjust the senor's position better. (I am embarrassed to say I forgot the periscope.) I had trudged up the slope to sight-in on the camera's position when I noticed two dainty gray squirrelettes lounging on top of the snag. They must have just weaned, and yes, they were cute. But their proximity to the owl nest only 4 feet below was too close for comfort. My warm and cuddly feelings weren't there. They didn't understand boundaries, and needed to find another tree.

I made a pathetic attempt to scare them off by tossing short twigs. They hardly noticed. Then I resorted to a long dead tree limb, but these efforts were equally laughable because I was endangering the camera. Finally the squirrels scampered down the snag and climbed a nearby oak.

I was again sighting-in on the camera when I was distracted by a big squirrel chasing one of the youngsters down the snag it had just climbed. This did not look like play or maternal discipline. They scuffled on the ground, someone squeaked, and the small squirrel broke free and bounded down the slope with big squirrel in hot pursuit. They scrambled up another tree, and -- OH NO -- big squirrel caught little squirrel again, and there was more squeaking. At this point little squirrel literally bailed out, free-falling about 25 feet to the ground, where he bounced on the leaf litter, and apparently none the worse for wear, ran down the slope and out of sight.

As if that wasn't enough excitement, I now heard a wheezy cough behind me.

"Chunka-chunka-chunk! . . . chunk-chunk-chunk!".

Another squirrel -- and a very large and agitated squirrel at that, was peering beyond me toward the victorious squirrel in the tree. Was this the mother of the vanquished weanlings? (I could see from its revealing posture that it lacked testes.)

"Chunka-chunka-chunk", replied the attack squirrel.

A chunka-chunk duel went on for a full minute, and then petered out.

The squirrel episode neutralized my funk about my bad luck with the owls. I've seen squirrel chases and rough and tumble play, but this looked like child abuse by the neighbor next door. What was going on?

Pack on my back, I looked up for the screech owl as I started home. I was almost directly beneath him, and though everything appeared as before, I noticed that his head was tilted down. He was watching me through squinted eyes. The bird was definitely sleep-faking.

Screech Owl update

Last week, after two days of no pictures and nagging fears that a squirrel had dined on screech owl eggs, I was ready to throw in the towel. I decided to wait a few days for my luck to change before going back to pull the camera. When I checked the camera yesterday I found 368 pictures (4 days worth) on the memory stick! Hallelujah!

There were no pictures of nestlings, but all signs indicate that there are young in the nest. Up till now, I never got a photo of two owls, and rarely got pictures of either owl going into the nest cavity. That's no longer the case.



And up till now, I only occasionally found pictures of the owls in the cavity. Now, 40% of the pictures were of the commotion in the nest cavity. There's a lot of flapping and excitement when the food is delivered.



Oddly, there were only three photos of prey: a Jerusalem cricket (or potato bug), and an insect larva.




Where are the mice? The woods are crawling with them. Or do dismembered mice invite blowflies and predators? I plan on keeping a camera on this nest until they fledge. Maybe I'll get a few pictures of the "fluffies".

More screech owls

After several days of adjusting camera position, I managed to get 4 more photos of the screech owl in flight (2.7% of 143 photos). I'm not finished with this yet. Now that I know the flight path, I'll try one or two more angles.

The nice thing is that the birds have habituated to the camera. Notice that now I am using the plural. A pair of consecutive photos of owls leaving the cavity proves that there is a pair, but I still can't tell them apart.

In this week's batch of photos there were still no images of owls carrying prey. I assume they are feeding away from the nest, but expect the male will deliver food when the female is incubating.

Does any reader of this humble blog know if screech owls regurgitate pellets away from the nest? Doesn't it makes sense for a nesting owl to keep the nest area free of cues to predators? There certainly is no sign of pellets in the vicinity of this nest tree.

Recluse in the snag

Three days ago at 6:13 PM a squirrel climbed down the snag and aroused the resident screech owl (who looked pretty scary to me). During the next two nights the owl took 143 pictures of its own comings and goings. Or should I say owls? If there is a pair, I can’t tell them apart.

The cavity is in a black oak and looked unused. So I was prepared for disappointment this afternoon when I went to check the camera. For nearly two weeks I have been using a new toy -- a telescoping fiberglass pole -- to raise the camera up to the level of tree cavities. This tree was second choice.

I expected a bonanza of pictures from my first choice -- a much-pecked flicker-sized cavity about 25 feet up. It had all the signs of occupancy, except the presence of a bird. The edge of the cavity had been chipped away and enlarged recently.

It was a bear of a job getting the camera into position, because when it is 25 feet overhead you can’t really see exactly where the camera's sensor is in relation to the cavity. From one angle they look like they are face to face. Then you move uphill to confirm it, and the camera looks too low. So you make adjustments and check again. And again. The other problem is pole-wobble. Even when anchored with guy lines, the slightest breeze wobbles the pole, which fools the sensor, and the camera goes wild taking pictures of moving vegetation.

After failing with a cavity that had "active nest" written all over it, I settled for one that was 12 feet up.



It looked abandoned, but I got a nice surprise. There were many shots of the little guy checking out the camera and the scenery.



And then there were shots of it clinging to the entrance.



And (whoohoo!) I got three pictures of the owl in flight.



Now to improve the set-up so I can get that picture of mini-raptor with limp deer mouse in talons.