WHAT A "WHOOT"

I'll post the final "Ice Age Floods Flight" in a few days, folks, but meanwhile enjoy my surprise visitor just outside our dining room window. Can you guess what this bird is? Well, OK, it sure looks like an owl, doesn't it? But what kind of owl? And just how big is it?

At times the daily crowd of birds doing "touch and go"s at my feeders can number in the several dozens. So it was on this occasion. I was studying at the table, when I became aware of a huge, dark cloud thrashing past the window. This was no chicadee, nuthatch, or finch. This was a comparative giant. I don't know whether the owl actually made a feeding pass at the smaller birds, but after sort of floundering a tad it finally settled on a low branch in the Austrian pine about fifteen feet away and at eye level to me.

"My camera!! Quickly!!" I hollered to Betty, and I was fortunate to get a few hurried photos while becoming aware of a bully batch of crows that were trying to spook my guest into further flight. We rarely have raucous crows make such a fuss here, so I guess the owl was their patsy before it arrived. These black bandits never let up on the owl and considered it an interloper worth their fuss and bother.

The owl's dark eyes were a first clue. Most owls have yellow eyes. The patterning of wing and tail easily eliminated the barn owl in a moment, thus we quickly narrowed the choice to either one or the other of two remarkable and somewhat notorious Northwest owls. It was the first step in making an identification.

There's another detail that helps the birdwatchers. As you can see, this owl is sitting with his back to the camera. That is a most unfortunate fact for the sake of the pictures because the two remaining choices are definitively and diagnostically differentiated by - you guessed it - the pattern of the breast and belly feathers! Otherwise, the wing and back are remarkably alike, with the horizontal striping clearly shown in the picture above being typical in both possibilities.

Enough teasing and testing: Strix Occidentalis, the Spotted Owl and Strix varia, the Barred Owl , the only reasonable choices, are very alike, with the field guides giving few differences other than agreeing that the Barred Owl may be a trifle larger on average. We guessed our guest to be 15" to 16" tall, and I know this specimen displayed a wingspan well over three feet, tip to tip, upon landing. Hmmmm. So it could be either bird! We watched closely for several minutes, hoping it would turn toward us. All that turned, however, was its head. First all the way around to the left until it stared me steadily right in the eye, and then in no hurry, it turned its head 360 degrees to the right until it again stared directly at me as before!! Only then did it swivel the remarkable neck straight up to spot the crows which were landing, squawking, in the top of the tree above it.

Had the belly and breast shown in this picture, no one would have doubted that the owl perched here was a Barred Owl. A shot of this bird's chest would have shown it as being spotted and the belly from "breastbone to vent" would have displayed the distinctive vertical stripes Peterson calls "streaks"! A spotted owl, on the other hand, would have had a spotted chest and a spotted belly with the pattern lower gradually becoming horizontal pale bands which Peterson describes as "bars", thus causing some confusion (bars on a spotted owl?. Well, just remember the real Barred Owl has up & down stripes on its tummy.)

How do I know which owl this was? As it passed the window already flared for landing with its chest and belly lifted up and out and the feet swinging forward to seize the limb, there was the proof! Vertical stripes!! I confess I hurried to the books several minutes later after the owl flew away across the neighbor's field (still harrassed by the crows) and into one of the ponderosa pines out of view. I hurried to confirm my guess so I could add the right choice to my bird list..

Strix Varia, species number sixty on my "yard list" is the Barred Owl. WOW!! It joins the Barn Owl and the Great Horned Owl to become my third owl on the list. Cool, huh?