Just got off the phone with John Hockema who is at the Rochester airport. He was listening to an interesting call that he could not identify. According to the airport workers, this call has been heard at the airport for at least a week. John's overnight job allows him special access to the airport, which is how he came to hear about it in the first place. Figuring that I was probably one of the few birders still awake (I am a college student, after all), he called me. The animal was calling as he was talking to me. I was actually able to hear the sound fairly clearly via cell phone...John said that the call was actually echoing off the buildings near him.
Sitting at my computer, I was able to compare John's sound to Burrowing Owl calls of both the Eastern and Western Stokes tapes. The pattern is identical: two notes on the same pitch, with the second note drawn out. Sibley describes this as a "high, nasal, trumpeting coo-cooo," which describes what John and I heard. The only difference that we could hear was that John's sound seemed slightly higher pitched than either the Western or Eastern Stokes sounds for Burrowing Owl. However, I think the Western sounds slightly higher than the Eastern on tape. >From this comparison, we feel that the sound MIGHT be that of a Burrowing Owl. John says the habitat looks ok for one...open fields at an airport. John will work on getting access inside the airport during daylight hours. That is all we can do for now. Standby...situation pending. Bob Dunlap, still awake in Nicollet County
