Not invisible any longer

Someone should tell the local Roundtop deer they are no longer invisible.

They used to be invisible when they were bedded down just next to the paintball picnic pavilion when it was midsummer and the underbrush was lush.  Now, with that thinner or nonexistent, I see their eyeshine and their ears in my headlamp every morning as I walk the dogs.  They don’t bother to get up. If I make a second round of the snow-making pond, they will still be there.  With hunting season on the horizon, not to mention poor weather, they will soon need a better hiding place and one that protects them somewhat from whatever cold weather throws at us this year.  Five of them bed down in the same place every night—a large, old doe; two somewhat smaller doe, and two summer fawns that have now lost their spots for the most part.  Maybe they just aren’t ready to let go of summer yet.

Summer has “let go” in other ways now.  The mountains are starting to show color and should be near their peak next weekend, if the weather stays chilly.  I can see a progression of the color from morning to evening now, and each morning brings more shades of autumn to the forest.

I hear both screech owls and great horned owls pretty regularly and often close to the cabin.  I never hear the two on the same day.  The big owl preys on the smaller one, which gives a wide berth to its competitor. I have yet to see white-throated sparrows or juncos, though both can be expected at any moment. The juncos are readily identified because of their white outer tail feathers.  The sparrows take some looking at and that with binoculars.  I was making a run to the recycling bin on Sunday morning, a 3-minute drive, and saw a small flock of sparrows, too far for someone without binoculars in hand to identify.  They could have been anything, but I’d like to think they were white-throated sparrows.  Even if they weren’t, those little sparrows will be here before long.

Around Roundtop, signs of fall are emerging almost every day.  Mostly I see the change in the smaller plants—the trees have yet to show much color.  Grasses and annual plants are turning shades of purple or red.  Dry weather has caused some leaves to fall, littering the ground with brown leaves but not the colors of fall. The western mountain shows some hints of color change in individual trees or branches, but I have to look close to see even that.

The forest around my cabin is thinning out, though.  I can see deeper into the woods, and I am ever hopeful for when I can first spot the outline of the mountain to my west.

In the early evening or sometimes in the early mornings I hear the calling of the great horned owls.  I hear both the higher pitched call of the larger female and the lower call of the smaller male.  Sometimes I think I hear a third owl but I can’t be sure of that.  It is still probably a bit early for their courtship, which begins in October, though that month is now but a few days away. Perhaps they are thinking about nesting, though.

Great horned owls are monogamous and famous for fiercely defending their territories.  All the years I’ve lived at Roundtop I’ve heard them calling. It’s only been rare times I’ve seen them, even when the calling is close to the cabin and I try to spot them with my headlamp.  After all this time, it’s possible but not very likely it’s the same pair.  They live an average of 13 years in the wild but the record in the wild is 28 years. I haven’t lived here that long yet, but I’m getting close!  Likely at least one of the birds I hear is a descendant of the owl pair I heard when I first moved here.

Still busy...and noisy, too

This morning at 4:30 a.m. the sound of several great horned owls calling right outside the cabin woke up the dogs, who began to bark, which woke me up. Sparrow also decided she needed to go out, now that she was awake.  So I stumbled out of bed, grabbed my headlamp, and we went outside.

The owls, three of them, were all very close.  The two females were the closest, the male a bit further away.  The one female was very close and had to be in my front forest, just a tree or two from the edge. With the headlamp I scanned every tree I could see but never caught her eyeshine.

The nearby hooting spooked Sparrow, who started barking and running around trying to find the something she was barking out.  Sometimes a particularly loud hooting sent her in the opposite direction, trying to get away from the sound she couldn’t find.

Needless to say that was the end of my sleep last night.  I rather hope tonight is quieter.

Early morning

Ready

The sound of great horned owls, the higher-pitched female and the basso profundo of the male, echo across the forest before dawn’s first paling.  They call back and forth to each other, one further up the hill than the other.

The last hour before daylight and the first hour of night is when they are most active and most vocal. I have lived on this mountain for more than 20 years now, and their presence has been a constant, though I have rarely seen them.

When I have seen them, it has nearly always been on a dreary, dark morning, when an overcast sky tempts them into staying out later to hunt for prey.  When that happens, crows may already be up and spoiling for a good early morning mobbing of the predator.  Sometimes, they meet up with another nemesis, the red-tailed hawk, which inhabits roughly the same ecological niche and eats much the same prey.  Those two are natural born enemies.

This morning was far more typical.  I heard the pair but never saw them, invisible companions.

Winter takes a holiday

Roundtop Mtn. peeking up from behind an orchard

Just when I was happily getting used to winter, what happens? Winter takes a breather. Apparently more than one solid week of winter-normal temperatures was more than the season could handle. It has beaten a hasty retreat and leaves me with April showers for the next week.

This is not the kind of winter I look forward to.

At the cabin, the great-horned owl was calling this morning, so distant I could barely hear it. That probably puts the bird over on the neighboring mountain, which lies across the narrow stream valley created by Beaver Creek. Earlier, in December, a pair were courting vocally very near the cabin. They have gone silent, probably setting up nesting duties and not wanting to alert other predators to where they have established housekeeping.

I did find a raptor nest not long after the leaves fell this fall, and I’m going to investigate this weekend to see if they are using that as their home base. The odds are not high that I would find the one place where the big owls are nesting on the mountain, but I can’t resist trying.

Years ago I rented a weekend cabin with friends on Hawk Mountain, just down the road from the sanctuary. My bedroom was on the second floor, and across the dirt road from the cabin was a great-horned owl’s nest. I had great views of the downy twins that fledged from that nesting, as my bedroom was just about the same height as the nest. It was like a real life webcam.

These days, a brief glimpse of an owl is about as much as I get, and that all too rarely. Most of the time I have to settle for hearing their calls echoing through the forest.

More of November's charms

Likely a raptor nest

 To November’s subtle charms I would add one more—the leafless trees mean I can now see nests that eluded me during the summer season. I found a songbird’s nest at eye level with my back deck on Saturday. I never knew it was there. And this weekend I found two more nests—one a squirrel’s nest but the other was for a larger bird, likely a raptor.

This last nest particularly intrigues me as it is located in a tree right above the trail that the kids walked up and down every day as they walked from the parking lot to Adventure Camp. That’s about 100 kids up and down the trail all the time and not just in the morning and afternoon. The nest is right near the outhouses, and you know every kid probably used those 3-4 times a day. And whatever nested there simply sat quietly and perhaps raised a family just above all that activity.


Squirrel nest - see all the leaves in it?  That's a good indication of squirrels



The nest may have been built by a red-tailed hawk or a crow—something fairly large judging by the size of the nest. Raptors tend to build their nests in the center of a tree, as this one is located. You won't find one of their nests out along the outer branches and probably won't find it nearer the top of a tree, either.



It’s possible this nest will be used by great horned owls later this winter. A local pair of those are courting near my cabin right now. I hear them duetting nearly every morning before sunrise. This morning they were duetting quite close to the cabin. Judging by the sound, they may have been sitting side by side, as their songs came from the same area. The male calls first and the female answers with a slightly different hooting call. To my ear her notes are the same but somewhat differently-paced and perhaps not quite as loud.

Though I have never yet seen it, I’ve read that while duetting the male leans over the female and puffs up his throat so that he looks like he’s swallowed a ball. I tried to find their location this morning in the pre-dawn darkness, Dog in tow, but was unsuccessful. Perhaps tomorrow I will be luckier if the season’s first snow doesn’t keep me from a morning walk.



Great horned owls nest in mid-winter and like all owls they never build their own nests. They merely take over one built by someone else. The calling by these two is close enough to the large nest I found this weekend to make me hope they might choose it for their own. If they do, I could at least attempt to keep an eye on it, though as high in the tree as it is, any owlets would have to be pretty large before their ears would peek over the top. Still, it’s worth keeping in mind and worth checking on in January and February, when the owlets would likely be born. I’ll write myself a note on the new year’s calendar so I don’t forget to check.

Avian Adventures

I can always tell when a great horned owl is around because the eastern screech owl that hangs out near my cabin is silent. Great horned owls will prey on the little screech owls, and they aren’t the only ones. Barred owls, long-eared owls and short-eared owls would all take a screech owl if they can find them. And that doesn’t count the mammals, such as mink, weasel, the ever-present raccoons and skunks, not to mention other large birds, such as crows. Screech owls have a tough go at keeping away from predators. So many things would be happy to eat them.
So this morning the screech owl was silent, and the big great horned owl hooted from higher up on the mountain, not as close to the cabin as the screech owl, but close enough that the smaller owl wasn’t about to draw attention to itself. Barred owls are also common in this area, just not around my corner of Roundtop Mtn. I have occasionally heard one down in a swampy area at the bottom of the mountain, but not for a while and never very often.

The presence of the great horned owl wasn’t worrisome enough to silence Doodle, my rooster, this morning, but the big owl never answered back the way the screech owl will. I still let my chickens out of their pen this morning, though the big owl could easily feast on one of them. The chickens love to be out in the woods and if the weather is bad or they feel threatened, they hide under the cabin. So far, that’s worked fine. Doodle finds a low branch and perches on it, with the girls below him pecking on the ground. He’s watching for danger so they can forage, but he’s only about two feet off the ground, so I have to wonder how much he really sees. It looks impressive, though—a big Rhode Island Red rooster alert for danger while the girls calmly feed and look for worms. Doodle is all about looking impressive.

The night visitor

Last night clouds moved across the sky, growing ever lower, and before morning drizzle began to fall. The spate of warm and lovely November weather is ended. When the storm clears, the weather will turn to late fall temperatures, and snow showers are even in the forecast for Thursday. Winter will soon be on its way.

When it’s cloudy at night and rain is due, the clouds actually make the forest lighter. The contrast between the gray clouds and the trees makes it easer to see further than does a clear, black sky against the dark trees.

After I turn the lights out at the cabin, the nighttime view from the window lets me see across the forest floor, until the slope of the mountain hides it. Last night, as I lay in bed, I saw the silhouette of an owl cross the view. It was a great horned owl, as nothing else is so large. It crossed my view heading diagonally across the window, heading towards the ground. No doubt a mouse, perhaps on its way to becoming dinner, attracted the night time predator.

I don’t often get to see the owls that live on Roundtop. I hear them frequently, often several times a week. The great horned is the most common, though I fairly often hear the eastern screech owl, too. Barred owls are rare up by the cabin, though are more common down in the swampy area at the base of the mountain. Anything else is very rare, possible only during migration. I’ve heard the saw whet owl a few times and heard rumors of long-eared owls, but have never seen one of those here.

Most often, when I do see an owl, it’s not long after dawn on a grey and rainy morning. I’ve always thought the owls simply hadn’t gone to roost yet because the morning was so dark. Seeing one of the silent predators of the night swoop across the forest in those few minutes when I lay waiting for sleep is the rarest of treats. I’m sure it happens much more often than I see it, perhaps many more times, but long after I have fallen asleep.

Too much drama

First Dog gets doused with skunk. Then a fox tries for the chickens on Sunday night, and last night an owl tried for the chickens. I believe that the dry weather has pushed the predators to spots they wouldn’t ordinarily be and to try things they wouldn’t ordinarily try. If my theory is correct, the rain that dampened the forest early this morning should put an end to all the drama. I hope so.

Dog is well, and his stink is now at a lower level. At least it is low enough to allow him back in the cabin during a storm. The chickens are well, too, but after two attempts on their pen in as many days, they are jumpier than usual.

Last night the chickens woke me up around 3 a.m. They were all worked up, but nothing was visible. They wouldn’t settle down, though, and then I heard a great horned owl call close by. I shone my headlamp in the direction of the sound but couldn’t find anything through the dense canopy of leaves. The girls took a long time to mollify and longer to settle down.

Just before 5 a.m. a thunderstorm rumbled through the forest, lighting up the sky and waking me up yet again. I went through the cabin, closing windows, relieved to hear the sound of rain on the roof and glad that it didn’t fall in a downpour. The rain was steady but would likely do some good and not just run off. By daylight, nearly an inch of rain had fallen in about 2 hours or so. That’s a good start, though after days of a heat wave and no rain, a bit more wouldn’t hurt. I sure hope it’s enough to ease the nightly dramas that have plagued my last few sleeps, though.

Night and dawn

The forest was dark when Dog and I began our morning walk today. The night sky was already starting to pale, but the trees still held the darkness close under the canopy of leaves. Today, the first sound I heard was not the sweet summer call of the pewee, the forest’s earliest riser. It was the hoot of a great horned owl, the night hunter.

The owl was a short distance up the mountain from us, its hoots loud enough to resonate. What better sign could there be that the days are already shortening? Instead of the morning bird calls I’ve been accustomed to for the past several months, today the night caller was still reigning the woods.

Dog and I hadn’t gotten far before the pewee began to sing, and for a few minutes I heard both the last call of night’s creature and the first call of morning’s. The owl would hoot, and it seemed the pewee answered, the two calling back and forth with perfect timing. For a few minutes the two shared the forest, in that hazy time when both night and dawn appear to be the same. And then it was truly dawn, and the owl retreated, while the pewee continued its song, this time a solo.