mjm@oliven.olivetti.com (Michael Mammoser) (03/21/90)
I have tried on several occasions in recent years to add Western Screech Owl to my life list. Although I have had these owls sitting in the trees above me, my flashlight searches have always failed to spotlight the bird. So this nighttime raptor, which is quite common here, has remained an elusive creature to me. Last Monday, the 12th of March, I attended a meeting of the local Audubon chapter that featured as a speaker, Mr. Jon Winter. Jon Winter has studied owls for about twenty years; the last ten spent on the Great Gray Owl in the Sierras. His excellent talk reignited the fire in me to go out owling. So on Saturday evening I, and my friends Grant and Karen, broke out the flashlights and tape recorders and headed for the Arastradero Preserve. We entered the preserve before sunset and, as we birded our way along, stopped to watch a Great Horned Owl sitting on her nest. She returned our stares with her own, fierce and unblinking. This was the second year in a row that the owls had claimed this nest, which previously had belonged to a pair of Red-Shouldered Hawks. As the sky darkened, we moved deeper into the wooded area of the preserve. At a suitable spot, Grant played a tape of the Northern Pygmy Owl. We received no response. It was our understanding, from Jon Winter's talk, that the call on the tape was of a subspecies from Arizona and not of the local owl. So Grant tried his best imitation of what we thought the local owl should sound like. Still no luck. I tried a tape of the Western Screech Owl with the same results. So off we went even deeper into the woods. We finally arrived at a spot where Grant had had some luck previously with both pygmy and screech owls. We repeated the tape playing and imitating of the Northern Pygmy Owl as before; with the same results. So I decided to play my Western Screech Owl tape. I played the tape three times at about 30-40 second intervals. After a few minutes of waiting, we finally got a response from the trees just next to us. We spent some minutes searching; our flashlights playing through the branches like some WWII air raid searchlights. We held the flashlights close to the side of our heads; a technique which Jon Winter assured us would help to see the eye- shine from the birds. Although the owl was calling continuously, we just couldn't find it. I decided to play the tape again, in the hope that it would entice the owl to move. Just as the tape finished, Karen saw the silhouette of the bird as it flew over our heads to the trees on the other side of us, and marked the spot where it had entered. Grant quickly found the bird with his flashlight and we all trained our binoculars on it. With two flashlights highlighting it, the owl seemed unperturbed as it sat in the crotch of an oak tree staring at us, its eyes glowing a warm orange from reflected light, like a jack-o-lantern with a candle burning inside. All the time it kept uttering its "bouncing ball and double trill" call. We soaked in the sight of the small owl for about five minutes. The bird, itself, was quite cooperative, sitting there for the duration. In fact, as we walked out, we could hear, some minutes later, the owl still calling from the place where we had left it. Mike