Mama/Papa Owls

Here is a small photo essay on the watchfulness of mama and papa owl. As long as the chicks could not fly, one parent stayed close to keep an eye on them while the other hunted. (We saw one small squirrel barely avoid becoming lunch by ducking under an asian honeysuckle bush.) The parents did not act as if they considered humans a threat; we took neighbors and a friend on a few "owl safaris" until the leaves came out enough to make them difficult to find. After the chicks were able to fly on their own, the owl family had a much larger range to cover, and we have had only one or two brief glimpses since.

Owls paying attention:





Owls taking 40 winks:

Upgrade to Ubuntu 9.04, part 1

My computer had been running Ubuntu 8.10 for quite a while; I don't like to jump to a new release as soon as it comes out, so that if & when I encounter a problem, a solution is out there on the Net somewhere. I decided to upgrade to 9.04 (the numbers indicate the release of April, 2009 -- Ubuntu updates every six months) in June, and everything appeared to go smoothly with the downloading of the packages and their install. Then I rebooted, and after the grub screen got:

root device not found
/dev/md0 does not exist
#

I was not a happy camper, to say the least. My software-defined RAID-1 array of two hard drives wasn't being found by the new bootloader. Time to reference the web! I booted from an 8.10 CD, and discovered that I wasn't alone. To continue from the BusyBox shell prompt, I learned, I could type

mdadm --assemble --scan; exit

This would cause the block devices to be scanned for RAID members and assemble any arrays. Then the boot would continue. To permanently fix the problem, and have the system boot normally, I had to create a new initramfs/initrd by doing a reconfigure of the linux-image package:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure linux-image-2.6.28-11-generic

There were also duplicated lines in the file /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf, but I don't know if they were actually creating a problem or not.

This degree of excitement was unexpected, but it was the only serious problem. There were, of course, annoyances, improvements, and adaptations with the new system, which I will make the fodder of another post.

More owl chick encounters

While out in the woods, Joan encountered the first chick a day or two later. It was barely ten feet up in a tree, a few feet away from the original sycamore. It was completely unconcerned with us; however, we knew Mama or Papa was keeping a close eye on things and we didn't get too close. But we got a photo through the leaves.


The very next day, we got our first sighting of the second chick as the light was fading. This time, we saw the chick eventually decide to go back into the nest for one more day.


The next morning, we saw the second chick emerge again. This time, it tried earnestly to master using the beak and feet to climb around the tree, but its coordination wasn't up to the task. The chick fell most of the way down the tree, flapping, and then it caught a small branch in its talons. This left the bewildered chick hanging upside down five feet off the ground. After struggling for a few minutes to right himself, the chick gave up, let go, and fell to the ground. It gathered its wits for a few moments and then toddled off into the woods. My guess is that this is perfectly normal behavior, and indeed, we later saw the two chicks clustered together in the same tree, waiting to be able to fly.

First Owl Chick

My apologies for not having posted for nearly four weeks, but it's been a very eventful month, including two weeks of hiking in the Canadian Rockies, and some family matters. Eventually I'll get this blog close to real time, rather than 3 months behind!

Meanwhile, cast your mind back to late April. We are constantly keeping an eye on the "owl sycamore", hoping to catch a glimpse of the chicks. Then one evening, with barely enough light for a photo, the first/older chick emerged.


What an entrance! We stared out the window with binoculars until the light failed, as the chick tested its grasp of the tree's skin. The young owl cannot fly for a few weeks after leaving the nest; they get down to the ground with a three-point stance (beak and two taloned feet) and an occasional but harmless tumble, then waddle to a destination tree and make a three-point climb. Ah, but that's a story about chick #2 a few days later.

Meanwhile, the parent owls kept a vigilant lookout. They harassed and were harassed by crows, especially, but their presence also rasied a ruckus among the robins, and there was a brief tussle with a passing Cooper's hawk that tried to land too close to the sycamore. Owls fly silently -- turn your back and they're gone without a whisper. I did manage one snapshot of the adult in flight.