The Christmas Bird Count season has finally come to a close, so with any luck I’ll stop talking about them in a few weeks or so. But not now – now is a time to reflect on birds seen, not seen, heard, not heard, as well as dead birds that someone wired to a tree branch for some reason. More on that later. For now, I want to reflect on some of my owling highlights across the five Christmas Bird Counts I helped with this season.
The owling, which involves targeted owl surveys between about 4AM and sunrise, was as slow as it’s ever been across most of my counts, including the Truro, Mid-Cape Cod, Plymouth, and Taunton-Middleboro counts. Even the “gimme” owl, the Eastern Screech-Owl, was downright demure on some of my counts. Most of the time you don’t even have to call them, they either chime in on their own, respond to recordings of other owls, or even sleepily respond to the screech owl recording we use to attract songbirds during the day if it’s overcast.
The same goes for the other common owl, the Great-horned. I don’t ever play their call, you just hear them if you’re out long enough before sunrise or near sunset – the resonant, hooting duets of a pair carry over great distances. Not this year – I got skunked for these guys on three of my early-morning owling efforts. But what we lacked in numbers of the common owls, we made up for with encounters with some of the more sought after species.
While owling in Dennis for the Mid-Cape count, I was playing recordings for Northern Saw-whet Owls at a spot I had them another year, one where dense cedars, a marsh, and a thicket all came together in a pretty densely settled neighborhood. As I walked around shining my flashlight, I caught sight of a bigger owl watching my Bluetooth speaker from a nearby tree – a Barred Owl! This silent opportunist had slipped in to see if it could eat the smaller owl it thought it was hearing. It’s the first one I had laid eyes on in over 25 years of covering this territory.
But that wasn’t the most surprising thing I found in my flashlight beam that night – that award goes to the stuffed toucan specimen that someone had wired to a branch along a trail though some dense cedar woods – not a stuffed animal, an actual, once-alive but now decrepit museum skin. You wouldn’t think a toucan could be scary, but by myself in dark woods at 4:30 AM, that zombie bird scared the guano out of me.
On my Truro count, I typically do my owling in the Herring River watershed. Something about the mix of pine woods and riparian thickets in that area is like a neon “Eat Here” sign for everyone’s favorite pint-sized night predator, the Northern Saw-whet Owl. In years past a couple of us have counted over 10 of them along a few miles of road. You never see them, they just respond with whines or toots, usually from belt high in one of the dense stream thickets they like to hunt in there. But this was one of those nights where I couldn’t even get a screech-owl to respond. As I walked down a dark, ice-covered dirt road in the 22-degree cold, questioning various life decisions, my flashlight caught the little, round-headed shape of a saw-whet owl sitting belt high in a dense shrub. Over the next couple of magical minutes, I watched it hunt from that perch, completely ignoring my presence. Its little head whipped back and forth like it was at Wimbledon, tracking mousey little sounds I had no chance of hearing. I had called to my owling companions as soon as I saw it, but a few seconds before they arrived from distant parts of the same icy road it dropped down to an even lower perch, then disappeared back into the thicket. I didn’t have my camera on me, sadly, but I did manage a grainy, flashlight-lit phone video. Which is great, because unlike the zombie toucan of Dennis, this is an encounter I actually want to remember.
