February 18
Good Morning
This week I went out scouting for owls. I have some friends coming up from the U.S. and I want to be current on my locations.
I spent three days out from dusk to dawn and only saw owls in the late afternoon, one species each day. We are having unseasonably warm weather now with highs just above 0°C. I think this is reducing the amount of time the owls have to hunt during the day so they are only coming out late in the afternoon. Tally for the week, 3 Great Grey Owls , 2 Northern Hawks Owls and 1 Snowy Owl and 36 hours of driving.
The exception was yesterday when my friends called me and shared that they were watching a Barred Owl about 15 minutes from my house. So I made a quick trip to a local park and photographed a Barred Owl in the afternoon light. In the second photo, the Barred Owl is coughing up a pellet. Owls eat their prey whole and cannot digest the bones and fur. So they cough up pellets. Biologists study the pellets to determine the owls dits. Doesn’t that sound like fun.
Speaking of fun, I just finished reading a book called “Owls of the Eastern Ice” by Jonathon Slaght. It is a very well written book describing a Ph.D student working studying the Blakiston Fish Owl in eastern Russia in the same area as the Amur Tigers. He describes the Russian landscape and culture as well as the incredible adventure of traveling and working in a very remote area of the world. I thoroughly enjoyed it. It puts my days driving around in a warm truck in perspective.
Here are a few of the owls I saw this week.
Stay Well !
Click on photos to see full size
