BAS Field Trip: Owling Green Canyon

Andy Kleinhesselink listens for owls in Green Canyon for the 2012 Christmas Bird Count.

Tonight we had a great field trip up Green Canyon with the USU chapter of the Wildlife Society.  A total of 18 of us worked our way up the canyon after dark in the light snow, stopping periodically to broadcast owl songs and calls.  It took a little over an hour to get our first response, a calling NORTHERN SAW-WHET OWL.  The owl started calling in the distance, but moved at least twice, coming closer and closer to us, calling all the while.  It was great to have the owl so close and loud - often owling involves straining your ears to make out distant sounds.  A little further up the road, we had our second owl of the night, a singing NORTHERN PYGMY-OWL.  This bird started with a fast song that had us a little confused about whether it might have been another Saw-whet Owl for a moment, but soon settled in to a very typical single-note Pygmy-Owl song.   At our next stop, we heard one owl give a single hoot, but we couldn't coax it into saying anything else and had to leave that one unidentified.  On the way back down, two observers were pretty sure that they heard a WESTERN SCREECH-OWL sing once, but no one else heard it and we couldn't get it to respond to additional broadcasts.  We ended a little after 9:30 PM, but not before helping someone else get their truck unstuck from the snow - they picked a lucky night to get stuck in Green Canyon!

Owling again

Last Thursday I went owling with Stephanie Cobbold, Craig Fosdick, and Dominique Roche. We were in search of two species in particular, Northern Saw-whet Owl and Boreal Owl. Northern Saw-whet Owls are relatively common in Cache County, but as these things go, somehow Craig and I had both not heard (or seen) them yet this year in the county. (I heard several while travelling for my field work.) Although they are in the same genus, Boreal Owls are at almost the opposite end of the owl spectrum: they are very rare here, with only one accepted record in the county.

We met at First Dam at 7:00, a little after dark, and drove up to the Tony Grove Road. Dominique had heard many Saw-whets along this road before, and even heard a Boreal Owl here twice several years ago (although I don't think he ever submitted a record to the Committee). We stopped every half mile or so on the way up to broadcast Saw-whet and Boreal songs. We always started by listening quietly, but this time of year most owls aren't spontaneously vocalizing, although some will still respond to a broadcast. After a couple stops of hearing nothing, we got to Dominique's hotspot. We listened for a few minutes, and again heard nothing. We played the Saw-whet owl call, and heard nothing. We played it again, and got a response! We heard two "barks," a sharp down-slurred abrupt vocalization, that stopped as soon as we stopped playing the recording. I hadn't heard that vocalization before, but Craig had: it was a Northern Saw-whet Owl. I wasn't immediately convinced, but after reading more about owl vocalizations and hearing several more recordings of Saw-whet Owls and other possible species, I now feel confident that Craig's identification was right. So, one more for the list. Now, if we could just find a Boreal Owl!