![]() Photo by Charles Bergman ‘A ver owl-ly place’ A Whiskered Screech-Owl clamps down on a branch before flying into the woods. It was all about her intense animal presence. This experience was not about connecting with an owl. But her wall-eyed stare was wild and impenetrable. I would love to know what she saw, looking at me. She looked at me with only a casual, almost dismissive regard. Her eyes were framed by white eyebrows that swept into cute little ear tufts. She was so small: about 6 inches long and weighing 86 grams (3 ounces). Oleyar had captured the female in a mist net as part of his study. The bird’s range continues south throughout the mountainous forests of Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and to northern Nicaragua. ![]() In the United States, Whiskered is found in the mountains of southeastern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico - the region’s famed Sky Islands that are biodiversity hotspots and magnets for rare species. Plus, Whiskered has a more restricted range than its cousins, the widespread Eastern and Western Screech-Owls. “The combination of their small size, secretive nature, and nocturnal habits make them a challenge to work with.” “It’s one of the groups of birds we refer to as ‘knowledge gap species,’” he says. I had joined David Oleyar, a raptor biologist with HawkWatch International, and his research team in the Chiricahua Mountains in southeastern Arizona, where he conducts what may be the only systematic study that includes the species. I held her legs between my fingers and lifted her to my face, eye-to-eye with a Whiskered Screech-Owl, one of the least-studied and most mysterious of all 19 owl species in the United States. They were the only splash of color on her gray, well-camouflaged body. The yellow of her eyes was so intense, they seemed to glow, electric and incandescent. If human eyes were as large in our faces, relatively, we’d have eyes the size of large lemons. ![]() And I cried.Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Print this Article Share to Email However, I remember that long ago, when I was a very young birder indeed, I held a red-phase owl in my hands as it died, apparently from eating a mouse poisoned by the folks next door. I probably should spend a moonlit night in a stakeout under the trees, armed with a big Mag-Lite. I’ve only heard, not seen, our resident screech owls (or the great horned owl that sometimes visits our wood) so I can't tell you if they are red or gray phase. Here are some samples of screech owl vocalizations from the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology. Then there are assorted hoots, barks, yips, screeches, screams, rasps and rattles, all with specific meanings to the birds. Neighboring males sometimes sing in synchrony at night. There’s another screech owl song that ornithologists call the “monotonic trill.” Used by courting males, it consists of 30 to 70 rapid notes on a single pitch and lasts three to six seconds. We’re hearing it so often at this time of year because the juvenile owls that left their nest cavities in mid- to late May in the Northeast are suddenly independent of their parents and are looking for turf of their own. And to humans who don’t know the source, the sound is so ominous that it was once described as “a most solemn, graveyard ditty, the mutual consolation of suicide lovers.” In fact, the descending trill is the male screech owl’s territorial song. A tremulous wail that lasts around two seconds with a falling inflection at the end, this song may be repeated several times.
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