A Weekend of Owls

Last weekend was one whose schedule was determined by owls. Not due to their traditional wisdom, but because we and our neighbors feel almost proprietary towards the barred owls that have nested nearby, and, fulfilling our hopes, we had fabulous opportunities to observe them, including at least one youngster, shifting our plans.

Our first hint that something unusual was happening was on Thursday or Friday, when one of the parents spent a long while perched in the pear tree not six feet from our kitchen window. Joan and I admired him, but I did not get a picture, being reluctant to step away.

On Saturday evening we realized why the parent had been loitering so close by, when Joan spotted a chick thirty feet up a tree. In this initial photo, taken at maximum zoom, he's just "resting his eyes." We alerted our neighbors, whipped out our binoculars, and we all were able to study his still-downy countenance as the light faded.

On Sunday morning, a parent was again in the pear tree. I was determined to get a picture; this snapshot has him facing away, but it shows how close he was, unconcerned about us.

Joan raised the blinds in the dining room to get a better look at the owl's face, and he responded by flying into the serviceberry that brushes against that window! (The following pictures were taken through the window.) First, an unretouched image, where the morning sunlight passing through the foliage gives everything, including the owl, a greenish glow. Our eyes could compensate for the color, but the camera cannot!

Here is a partially color-corrected image. The tinting from the sunlight wasn't a pure green, so it was difficult for me to reach a purely natural coloring through computer manipulation.

Here he is with a bit of zoom.

After several minutes of studying us he flew into the woods. We stepped outside, and saw that the chick was only a few feet from last night's position. At first, the youngster occupied himself by preening.

He soon became restless, however, and began flapping his wings and shifting his weight.

The chick did not have full powers of flight, but by flapping and hopping he could scoot along branches and jump to nearby trees.

At one point I sneezed, and the chick stared at me.

After a few seconds he lost interest, just as his parents would, and turned away.

About an hour and a half later a parent returned with a small fish hanging from its beak. It landed close to its offspring, and appeared to offer the treat, or at least to tantalize with it, but the chick never seized the food. This took place deeper in the woods than the earlier sightings, and thus was more obscured; Joan speculates that the parent was attempting to urge the chick into flight, to come after the fish. Eventually that parent flew away. Later a parent, possibly the same bird and possibly not, flew up to the chick: it is not known what was said.

The final owl story comes from our neighbors Dennis and Ilona. At some point in the last two weeks, a parent owl was sitting on the wren house in their back yard, facing the woods. This posture meant that the owl's tail feathers were obscuring the entrance to the wren house. Mama wren, not knowing just what the obstacle was, burst out of the house through the owl's tail. Whoops! She realized her proximity to beak and talons, and dove into ground cover.