OWLS - GIVE A HOOT

This post is dedicated to my wonderful Canadian friend.

The Owl Court O.W.L. - do you see it?

I am grateful for owls. If the short-named owls didn’t exist I probably would be living on the long-named Carolina Wren Court. That’s the name the builder originally gave to our street.  By the time we’d moved here they’d changed it to Owl Court.  Evidently the Carolina Wren had flown to another part of the development. Lucky us.

A recent early morning was cold and quiet and the full moon was still awake when I heard an owl’s voice as I did my constitutional here on Owl Court. Some owls here must have a southern drawl because the call was a new one to me. It was probably a Great Horned Owl, but instead of calling four notes: hoo-hoo-ha-hoo, this one called five: hoo-hoo-ha-hoo-hoo.

This year, March 7^th to the 9^th will be the International Festival of Owls*, in Houston, Minnesota. I’d love to be able to go for two reasons: first, a trip to Minnesota in the winter would be an adventure, and second, because owls are fascinating birds. The website says “The mission of the International Festival of Owls is to: spark a personal connection to owls and the environments we share with them.”  My personal connection was sparked many years ago when we moved to great owl country in upstate New York. Surrounded by woods – we couldn’t even see a neighbor’s house – the owls were very much at home.  An ornithologist friend of our neighbor told us we could add any owl we heard to our life list if we could identify the voice. That meant we could add the Great Horned Owl, the Barred Owl, and a Screech Owl. In this much more suburban area here south of Charlotte we’ve not been able to add too many more birds to our life list, but further south, in Congaree National Park, we finally got to see a Barred Owl. That was a rare treat.

 

The Barred Owl at Congaree National Park

 

*They’ve even got a Kids Hooting Contest. I’d be good at that – I am a hoot!