sensitiveevolution:Northern Pygmy Owl by mikeo765 Fun story:…
Sunday, October 1st, 2017Northern Pygmy Owl by mikeo765
Fun story: yesterday afternoon I was coming back from a hawk watch at which I saw my first Broad-winged Hawk (yay!), hiking down the Romero Canyon trail in Montecito with two other birders. One of them paused while we were passing through the big trees in the creek bottom and tried calling a Northern Pygmy-Owl by doing a really good impression of its hooting. He tried for a minute or so, then shrugged and we kept walking.
Today I was reading the sbcobirding mailing list, and another birder who’d been at the hawk watch and was behind us on the trail posted that while passing through the canyon around 6 p.m. he’d had a Northern Pygmy-Owl. That’s the same time we were there, and the location he gave was right where we’d been, so I wondered: had he ID’d the owl by ear, such that what he’d heard was actually our group member imitating the owl rather than a real one?
I emailed him to mention the possibility, all in good fun and haha; hope you’re not too bummed if that’s what happened. But the joke was on me: He wrote back to say that no; he’d ID’d the bird visually. He’d seen our group ahead of him on the trail, and just as we left the spot where we’d tried calling the owl one flew in behind us. He shouted “owl!” to us, but we didn’t hear him and just kept walking.
He got a cool photo of the bird. Those things are adorable. They’re less than 7 inches long; you could hold one cupped in the palm of your hand – if you didn’t mind its wee deadly talons! 😀
Reposted from http://ift.tt/2kfFzCJ.
