Good morning MSRW readers, thank you for checking back in with us again this week! We are sorry about the delay in publication, we had some issues uploading our photos. Though recent nights have been slowing down, we still had quite the productive week. There were only two nights with unfavorable weather that prevented us from opening. We caught twenty-four Northern Saw-whets, two of which were foreign recaps. Long-eared migration has been picking up, and we caught three this week. This was a good week for Barred Owls as well, after many weeks without even seeing one, we finally caught two. Most excitingly of all, we caught an Eastern Screech Owl! That was a highly unexpected but welcome surprise. They haven’t been caught at this site since 2017.
Catching three Long-eared Owls was a real treat! Two of our LEOW we captured in the same night. This particular male was very pale and is expected to get paler with age. We age our Long-eared owls by examining the number and pattern of bars on the central tail feathers (deck feathers). Younger birds have thinner, offset bars on their deck feathers that become thinner and more frequent towards the tips. Older birds (after hatch year or after second year) have thicker bands that match up with one another on either side of the rachis. They are also evenly spaced, and remain the same width all the way down to the tip of the feather. Similar patterns can be seen on the outer primaries. We also compare all their flight feathers to see if we can find older feathers, which will appear paler and worn-out. Multiple generations of feathers indicate older birds. So far, all the LEOW we have captured have been young second-year birds with a single generation of feathers.
On Saturday evening, we had a group of guests out to watch us band. It started off as a slow night and we thought that all hope was lost, but on the second net check of the evening, we found this beautiful Barred Owl in our Saw-Whet nets. They were remarkable well behaved; Barred Owls tend to be our most aggressive birds but this one was quite docile in hand. I suppose I would be equally surprised if I too was kidnapped by curious aliens on my way to dinner.
This darling lady was our last bird of the night, and because we released her after the sunrise, we were able to get some lovely photos. While we often do recapture our owls, we didn’t see this lady again and we expect she successfully continued on her migration north.
In other news, we finally had some other animal interactions! When opening one evening, we had to shoo away some White-tailed deer from the dunes around our nets. This did not work as intended, because as we circled around the last our nets, we heard the distinctive TWANG of a breaking rope and watched our net pole go down in a heap. The deer went straight through the bottom shelf, breaking the trammel and ripping a giant hole in the net. Luckily it wasn’t ensnared, and we had replacement nets. We also caught a flying squirrel! It flew right into our nearest NSWO nets and chewed through three trammels in a furious attempt to escape. Fortunately the mesh was undamaged, so we were able to extract them and restring the trammels without replacing the net. Our third unfortunate mammalian encounter has been named Edgar. Edgar is a porcupine, who lost our favor when we discovered his favorite pastime was chewing the rubber out of the undercarriage of our cars, tearing our wires and setting off dashboard lights. No one wants to go toe-to-toe with a porcupine, but no one wants to explain porcupine-induced damage to their mechanic, either. Though he tries his luck every couple nights, we are awake at the same time he is and therefore we have been able to chase him off.
Thats all, folks! Thank you so much for reading and we will get back to you with another update soon (and hopefully on time). Enjoy your spring bird-watching and warmer winds as summer rolls towards us.
