Owl right

I moaned a bit late last year about not being able to find a Screech Owl locally. This year I’ve had better luck, having heard one call a few times (though not close enough to count as a yard bird!). Then there were these guys…

You see a bird somewhere once, and every time you pass that way you check the same dead snag or lucky tree. Years ago, before I was seriously birding again, someone saw an Eastern Screech Owl in a roost box in Saratoga. And religiously, every time I passed by there I’d give it a peep. I have no idea how many times I checked — it’s on my regular route up to the grasslands — but it must have been upwards of one hundred. Then one sunny morning in February I looked up to see this sleepy face.

At Five Rivers in April, this little owl chose to roost in a hollow tree not 15 feet off a busy trail, and if you weren’t looking for it you’d pass right by.

So that’s Screech, Great Horned, and Barred for the year. We didn’t have another arctic invasion of Snowy Owls, and the deep early frozen snowpack may have sent the Short-ears south to more hospitable hunting areas. I’ll see what the winter brings!

Short-eared owl, 11/21/13

So there I was last night, sitting on the hood of  my car peering into the thickening dusk, looking for a owl I just KNOW isn’t going to be there. Why do I bother? Anyone else goes to this spot, the bloody birds zoop back and forth across the road like commuters running for a train. Me? Five tries, five strikeouts. Why do I even bother? Why…

 

Wait. Rewind.

 

It’s Thursday morning, so I’m getting up at the edge of dawn, layering on the thermals and scraping hard frost from the car windows. Upriver, searching for waterfowl. All quiet on the riverfront: the Canada Geese are probably all out in cornfields foraging. Up in the Washington County grasslands, only a few raptors present yet. But it’s 40F, no wind and sunny, so you don’t waste a November day like this.

Reports from Saratoga Lake suggest a chance to pad our year numbers. I haven’t often birded around there — there’s not a lot of public access to the waterfront. (That was one of the hardest things for me to adjust to when we moved up here, that I couldn’t just walk along the shore. The first thing any of us kids learned on Long Island was the High Water Mark Rule: anything below the wrack line is public property, be damned to fences and ‘No Trespassing’ signs. Doesn’t work up here…) So I get an extensive guided tour of how to sneak legal peeks at the often frustratingly-distant waterbirds, where the Purple Martins nest, and the secret password that gets you in almost anywhere. Want to know what it is?

“I’m looking for The Eagle.” Yup. No one takes you seriously if you say you’re looking for gulls or sparrows. Mention an eagle and previously suspicious people will jump out of their cars to point out the exact tree The Eagle perches in.

I pick up a Horned Grebe at the extreme edge of scope range for my year count — 212 for the state, 202 for the region!

At 3:30 I’m back at my car in Mechanicville. You know the thing about Mechanicville? It’s about halfway between home and the grasslands, where in an hour or so Short-eared Owls hunt in the winter dusk. (You thought I’d never get back to the owls, right?)

And that’s where we came in, me on the hood of the car, increasingly frustrated, almost ready to pack it in as the last light fades. Then a gliding form ghosts along a hedgerow, color almost the same faded dun as the grasses, wingbeats soft as it courses just above the brush.

It stays in sight for perhaps three breaths before vanishing into the treeline. My life look at a Short-eared Owl. At last!

(year count: 213 for the state, 203 for Region 8)