Our chickens had quite the life living in the foothills of the cascade mountains where cougars, coyotes & coopers hawks frequent the land.  We had already learned a tough lesson about the fragility of chickens from the bobcat.  But even normally nonthreatening creatures can wreak havoc under the right circumstances. 

It was late midwinter and snow was on the ground in enough concentration that it created excellent and somewhat rare snow tracking conditions.  I had spent the day following the trails of coyotes & bobcats & deer trying to identify the tiny tracks & patterns of mice, shrews & weasels.  I was surprised to discover that almost everywhere I went I kept coming across trails of the Virginia Opossum.  I had no idea there were so many of them in the area.  It's amazing how snow can show us formerly unseen worlds with new eyes. 

As I was heading home I noticed the trail of a particular individual possum moving parallel to the road I was walking on.  It was a private road more like a shared driveway that only saw a few cars every day so the snow was still present and you could make out the tracks of the possum as they crossed over and headed into the bushes. 

A little bit further along I saw the trail again as the road took a turn west and intersected with the trajectory of the possum.  When I arrived home I noticed the trail a third time coming out of the bushes and heading straight through our property. 

The next day when I went out to my sit spot I noticed there were possum tracks all over the field.  They seemed to be everywhere and I wasn't sure if there had just always been a possum around our house or if there was something special going on in their lives that was causing them to be so present. 

I mentioned all the possum tracks to one of my housemates and he said "Oh yeah, I've been seeing a possum in our garage." He had seen it in there multiple times over the past few days.  When I looked at all the possum trails in the area I realized that they all pointed back to our house.  All the trails were pointing to where it was making it's home at present... Our garage. 

Possums are apparently semi-nomadic & will stay in one place for a few weeks before moving on to fresh grounds.  It had been in there for a while so we decided to leave it for a bit longer to see if the possum would move out of it's own accord. 

Then one night long after the sun had gone down, everything was quiet outside & we were sitting with a few friends in our living room when we suddenly heard a noise of utter horror coming from the chicken coop.  It was the ducks & they were absolutely freaking out about something.  Thinking it had to be the bobcat again... a couple of us ran out the back door.  We got out just in time to see the tail of one of our ducks running blindly out into the night.

As we approached the coop who should we see waddling away from the crime scene but our resident possum.  It turned & showed it's bright blue eye glow & then crawled under our fence to disappear into the night.  It must have found some way to open the coop door and spook the ducks. It had vacated our garage and that was the last we saw of the possum.

We followed the duck tracks through the snow in an attempt to recover our friend but lost the trail when it got down to the creak.  It was so freaked out about the possum that it ran away into the night and never came back. 

What's the takeaway lesson from this story?

Never trust a possum.

When I lived at the homestead in Washington I was participating in the second year of a two year nature connection & leadership program that took place in the foothills of the cascade mountains.  Besides my own learning journey around bird language & animal tracking, every week I was practicing mentoring & community development as a way to help local home school kids connect with nature. I didn't go into town much & I had lots of time to explore & learn about nature & other interesting topics like how to take care of chickens.  We had a small flock of six chickens and four ducks that provided ongoing nourishment and entertainment.

This particular story takes place one winter day when the weather was mild & all the robins were still up in the hills.  They hadn't yet been forced down into the valley because there was still a lot of insect activity during the daytime.  To save on chicken feed & give them a more natural diet we were free ranging the chickens and they were quite happily filling their crops with the fruits of their forage on a daily basis.

I was inside the house working on some tracking journals when I noticed the ducks outside giving off a repeating agitated alarm call.  I looked out the window but saw nothing except that the ducks & a couple of the chickens were all looking towards one edge of the field that couldn't be seen from my window. 

I went into a different room to get a better look and saw that the rest of our chickens were out in the front yard beside our driveway. They were all looking at something that was very directly visible from where I was now standing.  My heart skipped a beat.  There in the center of our driveway stood a big hungry bobcat and it had it's eye on our chickens. 

I ran to the front door & opened it to go out but just as I did, the bobcat pounced, grabbed one of our chickens and bounded over the edge of the road and down the little drop-off to the creek.  I couldn't believe it.  That bobcat just stole my chicken! 

Without even thinking about what I was doing I called out "HEY BOBCAT!" and ran to the other side of the road.  When I looked down the little 10 ft hill... there down by the creek looking up at me with wide eyes was the bobcat.  It was completely still and staring right at me.  We looked at each other for a few seconds & I had no idea what to do.  I felt torn between wanting to save the chicken & wanting to preserve my relationships with the bobcat.  The tracker in me realized this was a great opportunity to observe some rare hunting behavior & bird language.

I knew it was too late for the chicken so I called out again in a less confrontational voice & said "OK, you can have it."  As if the Bobcat was waiting for my permission it turned & trotted into the bushes. 

As I brought my attention away from the predator I noticed that all the robins in the area were watching & making a lot of agitated calls... whinnies and tutting sounds.  When I listened along the creek I could hear juncos making their characteristic tacking alarm call like the sound of stones tapping together.  I listened as the alarms moved slowly through the thicket & eventually came to a stop where I assume the chicken was consumed. 

Over the next 30 minutes the landscape gradually came back to harmony.  The birds were feeding again & we started keeping a much closer eye on the chickens for the next time the bobcat would try to steal a meal.

In my last post Crazy Sounds from Barred Owls I told the story of how I discovered a Barred Owl was responsible for some strange noises that I had been hearing around my property.  Today I'll share the mind blowing events that unfolded in the week that followed...

I had finally discovered that the strange noise being made in the treetops was a juvenile barred owl.  It was so strange to see how different yet similar they are to adults.  I couldn't really tell any difference in the field markings but there was something about the way the owl looked that screamed "inexperienced animal."

It was really fun to watch how the birds responded to this predatory energy in the landscape. 

When I first saw it up in the oak tree, all the woodpeckers that feed in our backyard were alarming and circling up to watch the owl.  This was the first time I could ever truly confirm hairy woodpecker alarm calls and it was very instructive to learn about their behavior.  They didn’t so much make any different calls than they usually do but their alarm calls were more frequent than usual and they hopped up the trees to make a big circle around the owl.  Nuthatches were getting in on the alarms too.  At one point the owl swooped in after one of the woodpeckers but missed.  He seemed to accept defeat at that point because he flew off and the woodpeckers chilled out.

Over the next few days I saw the owl a few more times.  Usually for a good part of every day I could go out and hear alarms coming from various parts of the landscape.  It was obviously hanging out close by.

Then one evening I was sitting at my desk when at the window I caught some movement out of my eye and heard the thwap as a large wing hit my window!  I was certain it was the barred owl and rushed to look out.  It seemed to have pounced on something and then disappeared.  I ran outside and looked out into the fading light over the lawn and sitting on top of our bean trellis was the Barred Owl.

It looked at me briefly & then swooped down into the garden.  That’s when I heard the airy whistle sound again but it wasn’t coming from where I expected.  I looked up and sitting on our pea trellis was a second Owl.

I couldn’t believe it.  Now there were two of them.  The first one flew up to a low perch and the newly located owl pounced down onto the lawn.  I found a place to sit and watch.  They did this sequence of behavior over and over again.  Perching low for a bit and then diving down apparently attempting to catch something on the ground. 

So what were they hunting? Can you guess what it was?

I was in utter amazement of what I was seeing and as the light faded the cricket chorus was incredible.  The scene seemed like something out of a fantasy.  It’s not every day you get to watch the synchronized hunting patterns of two Juvenile Barred owls. It seemed too good to be true. 

But I still had this question of what the owls were hunting.  Why do they keep pouncing down like that?  Are they missing their target?  Maybe they’re hunting something that’s very abundant. 

I watched one dive down and then like a vacuum of silence where it had pounced the cricket chorus stopped and I suddenly realized what they were hunting.  The cricket larder was on and they were having a feast on my lawn.  What better way for Juvenile owls to hone their hunting skills than by practicing with large tasty insects that make a lot of noise?

As the last light waned from the sky I moved quietly back across the lawn trying to not disturb the crickets in their songs and slipped inside the house to leave the owls in their hunting.

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!

A few weeks ago I was visiting with some friends in Western Washington.  It was a beautiful sunny day and we had laid out a blanket on the grass to catch some sun when I noticed out of the corner of my eye some movement in the grass next to me.  I turned my head and realized that it was a worm.  But there was something different about this worm.

First of all, in this weather and time of day the worms are supposed to be below the surface. And second... it was moving at top speed for a worm.  I've never seen a worm move as fast as this one and it looked really bizarre.

I leaned in closer to get a better look and realized that it was running away from a long skinny beetle larva with razor sharp teeth. 

This miniscule insect was attacking the worm!

I called out to my friends. "Holy crap, come look at this."

We all gathered around and watched as the little larva at a significantly smaller size would latch onto the worm and tear chunks of flesh off.  It was a gruesome battle that continued on for several minutes.

Towards the end it looked as though the Larva was trying to pull the worm down underground but it eventually gave up. Suddenly, it scurried under the dirt and left the worm to dry in the hot sun. 

The worm was still alive so we picked it up and placed it in the shade of a shrub in the garden where it could recuperate and stay moist.

This whole sequence reminded me that small creatures like worms and insects often provide some of the best opportunities to practice nature observation.  It's extremely rare to get to watch a hunting coyote from start to finish but with the smaller critters there is a constant stream of stories to be gathered all around us if we can just look closely enough.

As a tracker, I'm always looking for the larger stories that are connected to the wildlife signs that I find.  Usually when I see a string of tracks from a large mammal, I only get a snippet of the story because it takes place over such a large area.  I love being reminded that with things like insects there are entire stories and lives written in just a few square feet. 

They are some of the best teachers and really fun to watch.

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.