5-Feb-2000 Big, Bad, and Barred
In all our years birding, Arlene and I had never found an owl on our own. We've seen them when we're with groups, and when people give us specific directions: “Go to the Lanesville cemetery, turn right and go 30 yards, park and look back at a big oak tree with a hole in the trunk just above the first big limb to the right. There's a screech owl in that hole.” Well, once when we were on Cape Cod the crows were making such a fuss that we went and looked, and they were harrassing a great horned owl. I'm counting that as “not on our own” because, basically, the crows showed us.
Anyway, today we went to Dunback Meadows in Lexington to walk and look for birds. It was another gorgeous winter day, cold but without a cloud in the sky. We walked down the main trail to the end, down a trail to the east until we decided that we didn't really want to explore farther that way in the cold, and walked out a main trail through the pine woods area where people had said there were owls. There were a lot of trees there for well-camoflaged birds to hide in. Arlene suggested turning back, but I saw some footprints going through the snow off the main path and said something like, “Let's hypothesize that these footprints were made by someone who knows where the owls are.” I stopped at some point when I noticed a few feathers in the snow on the ground. Could they have been leftovers from an owl's dinner? I looked around but didn't see anything. Then Arlene said, “Tell me what I'm looking at.” I followed her binoculars to where the branches of the second pine tree down the hill were thickest. It was a barred owl! We walked all around, trying to find a spot where there were fewer branches in the way. We never got a clear view of the whole bird, but we did see enough to be sure of what it was. That's a bird we've never seen in the wild before.
Some people have seen them a lot. Some people have them in the backyard. Here's a web site devoted to them with pretty amazing pictures. Judging from recent postings on the Massbird listserv, the woods are full of barred owls this year.
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