Spring Owl Banding: Week 8

Good morning MSRW readers! It has come to the end: as of this morning, the MSRW spring owl banding season is concluded. We have caught only stragglers and residents this week and as the sun rises, we will take our nets down and pack up the field site.

This week, we caught five Northern Saw-whet Owls, a Barred owl, and remarkably, two more resident Great Horned Owls. The Great Horned Owl we caught last week weighed 1.118 kg. The first one we caught this week weighed 1.312 kg, and the second weighed a whopping 1.902 kg! That’s a big change from our usual NSWO catches, who weigh less than 100 grams on average. Both of the GHOW this week were caught carrying prey. Our largest one brought in the strangest thing I can say I have ever caught in a mist net: a Smallmouth bass. The owl was still wet from dragging it out of Lake Huron when we took them both out of the net.

We could not positively sex any of the Great Horned Owls, because they all fell in the median ranges/ size overlaps between (generally smaller) males and (generally larger) females. We do know there is at least one breeding pair in the area, because we hear them dueting with one another in the early hours.

This little cutie was one of our few confirmed males, he was teeny-tiny in the hand and very eager to be on his way. We hope he finds a nice lady-friend and gets where he is going safely!

We came across a few more passerine bycatch early in the mornings, a Yellow-rumped Warbler, a Hermit Thrush, a Wood Thrush, and an American Robin. The woods are alive with more species every day: we heard Cape May Warblers and Black-throated Blue Warblers this week for the first time.

After being harassed by him all season, we finally got a decent picture of Edgar for posterity. He evidently gave up on chewing the rubber hose out of the bottoms of our cars, because we found him mowing down on the wooden sign down the road from our cabin.

One positive about the end of the season is that we can sum up the total number of owls we caught! Without further ado, from greatest to fewest, we caught:

Which brings us to a grand total of 245 owls banded this season.

We would like to say a huge thank you to all our guests this season, to everyone who came out and stayed into the wee hours of the morning to see these owls and learn about what we do. You all made the dim evenings feel a little brighter. Thank you for socializing your local recluses!

This has been a fantastic season and we are grateful to have been back in Cheboygan State Park again after several years away. We wish the other MSRW teams best of luck as they wrap up their work in the upcoming weeks and we all head out to work on different projects. Thank you so much for reading along with our adventures this season, and we hope you will come back to read this publication again in the fall.