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!

RECORD BROKEN!

Today I had an amazing day of birding around Cache County with Craig Fosdick and Stephanie Cobbold. Craig and I started at Tony Grove where we leisurely worked our way through the campground and around Tony Grove Lake. The highlight here was certainly the Northern Pygmy-Owl (photo above) that we heard calling and then were able to locate as it flew around looking for a small bird to join it for lunch. I heard my first Northern Pygmy-Owl earlier this year in Cache County, and this is only the second time I've seen one. It was neat to see Cache County's largest and smallest raptors at almost the same time: a juvenile Golden Eagle was circling high overhead as we heard the owl. Other birds here were pretty much as expected, but crossbills were suprisingly absent. We were hoping for a White-winged Crossbill, which had been reported here a couple of times but which I had still not seen.

We met up with Stephanie and headed up Swan Flat Road from Logan Canyon towards Idaho. Along the road (still in Cache County) we stopped for a large flock of crossbills that we could hear and see in the treetops. After scanning for several minutes, I was able to locate my lifer White-winged Crossbill in the flock of about 40 crossbills; as far as I could tell all the rest were Red Crossbills. The White-winged Crossbill (photo at right) was a very exciting bird for me because I have spent a lot of time looking for this species in the county this year and had not been able to find it so far. In addition, this was my 235th species of the year in Cache County, tying the record held by Keith Archibald and Ron Ryel for a Cache County year.

After a quick drive to Swan Lake just across the border in Idaho, we went back down the valley to Sue's Ponds in search of gulls. Only one gull, a Ring-billed Gull, was there when we arrived (later joined by a few more), compared to hundreds of gulls just a day earlier. After a few minutes of watching a large group of Long-billed Dowitchers feeding at close range, I scanned the back side of the pond again and spotted something we had all missed the first time through: an American Golden-Plover (photo below) foraging on the mud with the Killdeer. With this bird, a lifer and a rare find in Utah, let alone Cache County, I set the record for the most number of birds seen in Cache County in one year at 236. Wohoo! But don't worry, the blogging's not done yet. Of course, I'm going to keep birding until the end of the year, and I'm going to see as many new birds as I can. Stay tuned. . . .

Lunar Eclipse and Another Lifer

Tonight I went snowshoeing with my friends John, Stephanie, Stacey, and Sarah to watch the lunar eclipse and to play some owl calls. We started up Green Canyon, just outside of Logan, at dusk (6:30) and stopped every half hour or so to play owl calls. I mostly played the calls of Northern Pygmy-Owls and Northern Saw-whet Owls because I thought these would be the most likely for the habitat, but we also tried Western Screech-owl, Long-eared Owl, and Great Horned Owl calls. After about five stops to play owl calls, we finally got a response: my lifer Northern Pygmy-Owl calling from off in the distance - a simple hoot about once a second. It was a surreal hike, with the moon going into and out of eclipse as we hiked in the dark underneath it, and a Pygmy-Owl finally calling just as the moon emerged from the Earth's shadow.