This is a picture of Feist, another owl that left without giving us much time to track it. We were able to get one days roost data before the weekend, and when we came back, she was gone.

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We have now been tracking Isra for over 2 weeks now, with a lot of good data coming from our long nights at King’s Gap and in the Michaux State Forest. With the migration season in full swing for the owls, we are now starting to hear the strange barks and whines of the saw-whets as we are walking through the forest. Sometimes it’s the owl we are tracking, but often it is another saw-whet in the woods.

Isra has a routine going for her that she repeats every night we have been tracking her. Soon after dark, she leaves her roost and becomes very active, flying back and forth along the King’s Gap/Michaux State Forest border. She keeps us on our toes as we run around, trying to figure out where she is off to. Several times she has completely ditched us, only to show up back at near the banding station at King’s Gap. o

After flying around for several hours, presumably hunting, she often settles down for several hours and gives us some time to relax and enjoy the night sounds other than our feet crunching the newly fallen leaves.

Isra often stays relatively still until soon before dawn, when she starts flying again and soon ends up in the pitch pine where she will roost for the day. As the sun comes up, we get to go search for the roost site so we know where to find her the following evening.

The newest saw-whet owl with a transmitter is Esmerelda. Here she is with breakfast in her talons. Does anyone know what it is?

A couple weeks ago I started at a new job as the field tech for the Northern Saw-whet Owl telemetry project run by the Ned Smith Center for Nature and Art in central PA.

So far most of the time has been spent training and waiting for the owls to begin migrating thru our area. Due to several factors including weather, saw-whet migration is behind normal schedule but we have radio-tagged one saw-whet owl so far, Xena.

We also radio-tagged a screech owl, Skreech, for training purposes while we were waiting for our first saw-whet. Here is a shot of her, high up in a chestnut oak staring down at us.