This week I have a new story from the world of the barred owls.  I can't believe how much I've learned about them in the last week.  There has been a story emerging at the current place where I live that is showing me some really interesting facets of their lives that I've never been able to see before.  It's also given me new insights and caused me to reflect on the experiences I've had with barred owls in the past.  It adds a new layer of questions to the last story I shared about the lawnmower wake feeding.

This story starts off one early summer morning.  It was just a little before 6 in the morning when I headed outside to listen to the birds waking up.  As I got out the door it was still dark, but light was starting to appear on the horizon.  Everything was still quiet except I noticed one of the most bizarre sounds I have ever heard.  It sounded like a soft airy whistle rising in pitch and I had no idea what it was.  This was new to me.

My first thought was that it was some sort of Owl but I wasn't sure and also considered the possibility that it was some other sort of nocturnal bird or maybe an insect.  The sound wasn't very loud but it was very distinct & repeated over and over again. 

I went to sit down and continued listening.  As the birds started to wake up the sound changed locations and pretty soon had abandoned the landscape I was in.  It was clearly coming from in the tree canopy but I didn't get a chance to see what was making the sound so I had to settle for calling it a mystery.

A few days went by and I was out on the lawn one afternoon enjoying the sun when I noticed robin alarms coming from the trees a few houses down.  I listened and noticed that it sounded like the parabolic alarm that you would see around a nest robber, or a cat, or an owl.  I was leaning towards cat even though looking back on it now; the alarms probably had too much intensity to be a house-cat.  This was more like the response I would see towards a bobcat but we don’t have bobcats in this neighborhood. I noticed that the alarms would occasionally stop altogether but that if I kept my ear out for long enough it would start up again. There was definitely something going on but I didn't make the link to that sound I had heard the other morning.  Another mystery...  I wasn't sure if I'd be able to solve this one.

That evening however I was sitting outside eating dinner with my family when we heard the sound again.  It was very close and I recounted the story from the other morning and wondered if we could get a look at it.  Then suddenly my mom pointed up in one of the oaks and said, "There's a big bird up in that tree.  I think that’s what's making the sound."  I ran to get my binoculars and we confirmed that it was a barred owl.

But there was something off about this owl.  Something about it felt different than other barred owls I had seen in the past.  It looked a bit different from other barred owls I had seen & it’s behavior seemed a bit dopey for lack of a better word, plus it was making this strange noise. 

Did it have something to do with gender?
Time of year?
Maybe it was a juvenile...  I went to my computer and found a recording of the sound.  Sure enough... it's a juvenile.  That’s why it was acting so strangely and making that sound.

Another mystery solved... but that did not prepare me for what would happen over the next few days.  I'll post the next part of the story soon.

Last year I lived in Washington State on an old homestead property in the western foothills of the Cascade Mountains.  There was a lot of wilderness there.  It wasn't the end of the road but a quick walk down the street would leave you in a forest that was on the edge of a massive patch of land that went up the mountains and onward to the other side.  It was huge.  We had a good number of animals that would come by our house regularly including bobcats, cougars, coyotes, deer, and the occasional bear.  I had a lot of really cool encounters with wild animals but none more frequently than the Owls and in particular the barred owls. 

When I first moved in I noticed pretty quickly that their hoots were a common feature of our nighttime sound-scape.  At certain times of year I would be awakened by whole groups of them in close proximity to the house all calling to each other and causing a raucous.

I would hear bird alarms coming from particular trees during the daytime and often wondered if there was barred owl hiding out in the cedars or in amongst some dark spot.  I tried many times to go into those places and see them but I always met with failure.  Until one day something changed on the landscape that cause one barred owl to suddenly become very conspicuous and observable.

The house had a couple of grassy paddocks that had probably held sheep at one time and the front lawn had been left unmowed all summer so that all around the house and in the meadows there were tall grasses that had gone to seed and moving through there were deer trails, snakes, and tons of vole activity.  There was so much vole activity in these grasses that when I would sit at my sit spot in the pasture I could hear little movements and rustling all around me almost non stop some days. 

It was at this time when the grasses had almost completed their yearly cycle but well before they died off that my landlord decided to mow the lawn.  He left the grasses in the two paddocks but everything close to the house was cut to within a couple inches of the ground. 

In the following days after the grass was cut my housemates and I started having numerous close encounters with a Barred Owl that had suddenly taken up residence in our yard.  It was also at this time that I started noticing the Jays acting differently.  They seemed a lot more active on our property than they had been and robin alarms became a more regular feature around the house.  It didn't take me long to figure out that the shift in the bird behavior was linked to the barred owl and within a couple days I had figured out that I could easily find the location of the Owl on our property by following the alarms from the Jays, Robins, Chickadees, Sparrows, Towhees and Flickers. 

Sometimes it would sit on top of an old metal play swing that we had in the yard.  Other times it would hang out in the alders behind the house.  It was always close by and didn't seem too concerned that we were watching it from close range.

I started to wonder about this.  Why did this Owl suddenly change it's behavior and start sitting out the open?  This normally shy bird was being ultra conspicuous and it was a mystery to me. 

A couple weeks went by and the barred owl continued to stay close.  I would watch it hunt voles in the paddock and one day I saw it kill and eat a garter snake under the big leaf maple beside my sit spot.

Then just as soon as it had arrived, the owl seemed to abandon our yard.  The jays calmed down, and the alarms stopped happening in the pattern that had been like the norm for so many days.

I don't know for certain why that owl decided to stay so close for those couple weeks but I do see a pretty strong connection between the time when the lawn was mowed and when the owl showed up.  My theory is that the lawn mower displaced a lot of voles into a much more vulnerable position than they're used to.  It "blew their cover".  All the voles that had lost their homes moved in to unfamiliar crowded territory & it created an amazing vole Larder for owls. 

Whatever the reason, I'm really grateful to have gotten such a close time of connection with the barred owls & whenever I hear owls calling to each other in the night I always remember the one that stayed close to our house feeding off the fruits of our landlord's lawnmower.

A couple weeks ago I wrote about my first experience with learning to keep track of house cats by listening to bird language.  The story continues to evolve and I'm always amazed at how complex and changing nature can be.  There's always something new to learn about the things I study.

Today when I was outside at lunchtime I noticed a black cat walking along the edge of a fence near where I was sitting.  It hadn't seen me and it was moving along in the classic cat style where it would take a few steps and then pause and look around before continuing on it's trajectory.

I remembered what one of my mentors of bird language said to a group of people that had joined to study the birds on a property in California.  He said that one of the biggest mistakes people make when they see a predator that causes a alarmed disturbance in the landscape is to focus on the predator.

It's a natural response because the predator is the center of attention but he said that in those moments, the best thing you could do to learn more about the bird language is to look around and send your ears out to notice everything else that's happening in response to the predator.

I've been amazed in the past when I've seen a hawk and managed to pull myself away from the excitement of the moment to take in everything else that's going on in the scene.  It's incredible how much I miss when I focus in on the predator, and how much more I learn about bird language when I stretch my senses to everything else in the landscape around the hawk.

So this is exactly what I did with the cat.  I moved my eyes to watch it only peripherally and checked for signs of any bird alarms in the area.  I remembered the response that I've seen around cats on this property in the past but with this cat, there was absolutely nothing.  No response.  No Alarms.

Maybe the birds aren't active in that area at this time of day?
Maybe the birds don't feel threatened by this particular cat?

I have a few theories for why sometimes cats cause lots of alarming and intense excitement while at other times they seem to elicit no response.  In order to answer this question I need to watch this particular cat more often.

But the one thing I did notice was a little chipmunk.  As the cat slinked out of sight into the bushes a chipmunk bounded out of the forest from the opposite direction moving towards the cat and made a few sharp calls.  Brief but distinct.  Then it was quiet.

A few more seconds went by and it resumed it's alarms but this time in a way that I hear very regularly on this property.  If you know the Eastern chipmunk then you've probably heard their alarms that repeat over and over again sometimes getting faster, sometimes slower.  I've always wondered if these calls were actually alarms but today was the first time I had any sort of concrete evidence. 

I can't count the number of times when I've heard those alarms and discounted them because of their isolation from any other alarms yet here I was watching this chipmunk alarm in this very fashion all alone as looked towards the direction where the cat had gone.

It taught me that no matter how many times you see an alarm in action, there's always deeper and more subtle layers to pick up on.  I'll keep my eyes out for more lessons from this black cat and let you know what I discover.

Thanks for reading!

I like to tell bird language stories. 

When I say bird language, I mean the alarm system used by the birds to communicate when predators are moving through the forest. 

When I first heard that it was possible to tell from long distances simply by listening to the birds that there was an animal moving out in nature I was so fascinated by the possibility that I immediately started paying more attention to the birds.  I wanted to learn all their calls, songs and alarms so that I would be able to understand by their behavior when there were animals around and eventually be able to see those animals.

I remember the first really clear experience for me of using bird alarms to find an animal came one summer a few years ago.  I was out at the spot in my yard where I sit to watch the birds and generally just unwind and re-energize from my day.  I had been sitting at this spot for a few months and I had started to learn the regular patterns of behavior given by the birds there. 

I noticed however on this day amongst the usual visitors and activities that there were two song sparrows making some intense calls in the thick area of firs behind the bird feeder.  I listened and waited for a long time and it seemed like they were making noise for no reason until into view from that exact area came a local house cat. 

As she moved along the edge of my yard I could see the sparrows moving along with her, looking down and making their scolding alarm calls.  As the cat moved out of my yard and down towards the creek beside my neighbors yard I could follow the sound of those alarms as they passed from the song sparrows to the hermit thrush and onward to the juncos. 

It was so incredible to be able to follow the movements of the cat even after the cat left my sight line.

The real test of my observations for me however is whether or not I can reproduce my success.  Whether or not I had heard the alarms I still would have seen the cat... so I set out discover if I could find a cat that would normally have escaped my awareness by paying attention to the bird language.

A few days later I was outside laying in the sun when I heard the tacking alarms of some juncos.  They were alarming in the same way I had heard around the cat earlier in the week.  I wondered "could that be another cat?"

I followed the source of the noise around the side of the house and I had a clear sight to the firs where the birds were centered.  I didn't see anything but continued to stalk up as quietly as I could to try and spot what the juncos were looking at. 

I approached a small trail on the far side of the yard and right near where the juncos were making that sound, I spooked a cat who had been slinking up the trail.  My cat test was successful. 

I love Bird Language.