Last night I surpased 200 miles of owl road surveys for this month, all in northern St. Louis County and central/northern Lake County. This translates to ~270 3-minute listening stops. Results: 4 barred owls and a pair of great horned owls. Good thing I'm not being paid by the owl. Oh wait, I'm not being paid! Maybe I should find another hobby.
Regardless, negative data can be illuminating. I'm particularly struck by the lack of northern saw-whet owl detections. I normally start hearing the early beepers in March, with far less effort than I've expended this year. I wonder if they might be delaying breeding because of the conditions presumably causing the irruption--deep snow and lack of prey. I'm curious if others are hearing singing saw-whets yet, particularly in northern Minnesota? Please let me know. I'm targeting routes where I found significant numbers of singing boreal owls in the late 80s and early 90s. One could hypothesize delayed breeding for them as well, but since they've become so hard to find in recent years, irruption or otherwise, that would be more speculative yet. ---- Join or Leave mou-net: http://lists.umn.edu/cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=mou-net Archives: http://lists.umn.edu/archives/mou-net.html
