Who Knew a Bird Day Would Have Headlines Everywhere? Happy Superb Owl Sunday!!

I know today is Superb Owl Sunday, but I was surprised to see all kinds of headlines about it in the newspaper and on the internet. And I'm really confused about what the San Francisco 49ers have to do with bird-watching. I mean, I could see it if we were talking about the Seattle Seahawks, or the Atlanta Falcons or some such. But in any case, HAPPY SUPERB OWL SUNDAY!

Here are some of my owl shots to celebrate with. The first one is a Great Horned Owl (Bubo virginianus). We were at the Merced National Wildlife Refuge where we almost always see some nesting owls at this time of year.

The second picture is a Burrowing Owl (Athene cunicularia) that I saw a few years back on the north shore of Turlock Lake, in the midst of the California prairie. They are never abundant in our county

The last picture is a Hawaiian Short-eared Owl, or Pueo (Asio flammeus sandwichensis). To say it my most recent picture is technically correct, but it is also my only picture of a Pueo. I took it in 2009 while traveling with students on the island of Kauai. The owl is native to Hawaii, and is a subspecies of the widespread Short-eared Owl.

Have a great Superb Owl Sunday, and happy hunting for your own owls. I mean, what else are you gonna do today?

(Note: this is a replay of a blog that appeared the last time the 49ers were in the Super Bowl).

One Rock Wasn't Like the Others...

 

It was the biggest weather event of our year, in which we received about a third of our yearly precipitation in just two days. In the aftermath, it was a sunny afternoon and it seemed a nice time to check out Willm's Road in the prairies just east of our town. I've been a geologist for far longer than I've been a birder, so I also enjoy looking at the rocks. Passing an outcrop of metamorphic rock, I saw one that was a bit rounder than expected. I stopped the car and backed up and pulled out the binoculars. That was no rock!

The camouflage was almost perfect. It was a Burrowing Owl (Athene cunicularia) watching over the roadway. It is always a thrill to see one of these inscrutable birds, and I rarely see them more often than two or three times a year if I am lucky.

The Burrowing Owls Finally Make an Appearance!

As we get towards the end of the year, I start to review the lists and try and figure out which birds I love, but have not yet seen. Two weeks ago, the Phainopeplas arrived on the Tuolumne River Trail and I was finally able to check them off the list, and the next most favorite bird moved to #1: the Burrowing Owl (Athene cunicularia).

I was distressed about not seeing a single Burrowing Owl all year. I've been concerned about their welfare in our area because they are denizens of the prairie, and the prairies in our region are being dug up and planted with almond orchards, some 40,000 acres in our county in the last decade or so. We've made a number of trips through the seasons on Crabtree and Willms Roads in the Mother Lode foothills between the Tuolumne and Stanislaus Rivers. We've seen lots of interesting birds, but not a single owl was to be found anywhere.

The little owls sometimes dig their own burrows, but most of the time they take over the abandoned burrows of other creatures like badgers or ground squirrels. They hunt and consume a huge variety of small mammals, reptiles, and large insects, and hunt day and night. Almond orchards don't really provide that kind of habitat or food resource, so the birds get pushed east into the foothills.

So here it is, early December, and no Burrowing Owls anywhere. I had a few extra minutes this afternoon (it's been a loooong semester), so I drove out Crabtree Road, and finally saw two of them! They were several hundred yards away, and I don't know how I ever spied them. I was pleased, but there were no possibilities for pictures. I headed back home, and saw a bird ahead on the fence by the road, but it flew into a depression and disappeared. I slowed a bit and I saw it land on the fence behind me.. I rolled to a slow stop and very slowly opened the car door to get out and try for some pictures. Much to my surprise, the owl cooperated! Enjoy!

 

Who Knew a Bird Day Would Have Headlines Everywhere? Happy Superb Owl Sunday!!

I know today is Superb Owl Sunday, but I was surprised to see all kinds of headlines about it in the newspaper and on the internet. And I'm really confused about what the San Francisco 49ers have to do with bird-watching. I mean, I could see it if we were talking about the Seattle Seahawks, or the Atlanta Falcons or some such. But in any case, HAPPY SUPERB OWL SUNDAY!

Here are my latest owl shots to celebrate with. The first one, above, is from last Friday. It's a Great Horned Owl (Bubo virginianus). We were at the Merced National Wildlife Refuge and had completed most of the auto loop. There is one last group of trees that we always check out because there are often a few owls hanging out and Friday was no exception.

The second picture is a Burrowing Owl (Athene cunicularia) that I saw last November on the north shore of Turlock Lake, in the midst of the California prairie. They are never abundant in our county, and none have been noted yet this year.

The last picture is a Hawaiian Short-eared Owl, or Pueo (Asio flammeus sandwichensis). To say it my most recent picture is technically correct, but it is also my only picture of a Pueo. I took it in 2009 while traveling with students on the island of Kauai. The owl is native to Hawaii, and is a subspecies of the widespread Short-eared Owl.

Have a great Superb Owl Sunday, and happy hunting for your own owls. I mean, what else are you gonna do today?

Burrowing Owl on the Prairie!

We been really hunting for owls on our last few trips. We haven't seen many this year, and had become curious if there are actually fewer of them around. I've been watching our "owl trees" at the Merced and San Luis National Wildlife Refuges without success, and last spring we searched our known owl nests and didn't see much there either. I've had a few fleeting views of Barn Owls while driving home in the darkness, but of course photography was out of the question. I've heard a few Great Horned Owls at night. But our favorite, the Burrowing Owl (Athene cunicularia) remained elusive. About four days ago we had a quick glance of one on Willms Road in the late twilight, but it wasn't until tonight that I got a good look at one.

I was taking a roundabout route to the CSU Stanislaus campus in the late afternoon and decided to check the north shore of Turlock Reservoir, a spot where I've seen Burrowing Owls before. Out of sheer habit I check a particular barbwire fence along Lake Road where I had seen one a year ago, and much to my surprise, there it was, perched in almost the same exact spot. I guess we recognized each other because it didn't up and fly away when I pointed the camera.

It's nice to see them out and about.

A Head-spinning Tale...Do we need an exorcist? A Burrowing Owl at the Merced National Wildlife Refuge

Tell me when you see it...

Do you see it yet?

We were out at the Merced National Wildlife Refuge today and Mrs. Geotripper kept saying there was something...out there...

I kept insisting that it was just a couple of ground squirrels out in the grass, but she was sure that something was...watching us. I ended up focusing on what I was sure was an extra fat ground squirrel and found out that indeed something was watching us. It was a Burrowing Owl (Athene cunicularia). The east part of the auto tour at the Merced NWR traverses prairie and grassland. Other birders have often reported seeing Burrowing Owls there, so I've always been watching for them, but without success. This was a nice moment, not unlike the moment a few weeks ago when we were treated to a Burrowing Owl at Turlock Lake.

The Burrowing Owls have had a tough time of it, as their habitat has been seriously co-opted by human beings. The grasslands of California, especially in the Central Valley, have been largely taken over by agriculture. I'm truly ashamed to note that my own county has seen the conversion of around 40,000 acres of former prairie to almond tree orchards in just ten years or so. They will probably be abandoned with a decade or so because of water and irrigation conflicts. The string of national wildlife refuges in the valley provide critical prairie areas where the owls can thrive.

There are few things more eerie than an owl rotating its head to stare at you. Check it out in the video below...

A Late-afternoon Surprise, a Burrowing Owl near Turlock Lake

I don't see a lot of owls because they are mostly active at night, and I'm not. Mostly they are a ghostly presence on fences in the farmlands that I travel through on the way home from work. There are exceptions: the Great Horned Owls at the Merced National Wildlife Refuge are usually visible when the trees lose their leaves in winter, and there is a singular Burrowing Owl that hangs out on Dry Creek that we'll sometimes see when taking the backroads to Knight's Ferry on the Stanislaus River. But today we had a nice surprise. We were out on a spur-of-the-moment birding trip at Turlock Lake State Recreational Area, which is an irrigation reservoir in the Sierra Nevada foothills just east of Modesto. We saw a fair assortment of bird species, but as we were leaving I saw one more bird perched on a fencepost and I knew right away that it was too stocky to be another Meadowlark. It was a Burrowing Owl (Athene cuicularia) only about fifty yards from the highway. I got a couple of decent shots before it took off into the adjacent field.

What? Another Burrowing Owl?

I don't usually post about the same bird on successive days, but it turns out that Mrs. Geotripper was not with me yesterday when I sallied forth and discovered a Burrowing Owl (Athene cunicularia) in the prairies east of my town in the Sierra Nevada Foothills. The odd thing is, I've seen Burrowing Owls only three times, and the three sightings were within a hundred yards of each other, even while years apart. Mrs. Geotripper wanted to get pictures of her own so we headed back out to Willms Road near Knights Ferry.

The funny thing is, we saw a fourth owl in a different spot, on Crabtree Road. So the spell is broken. I'll probably finally start seeing them everywhere now. If it illustrates how hard they can be to detect in their home environment, see if you can locate the owl in the first picture. It's there, honest! Mrs. Geotripper got the clearest close-up, seen below.

Burrowing Owl on What Remains of the California Prairie

I don't know why this is...Burrowing Owls (Athene cunicularia) live all over North and South America, especially on grasslands of the western United States, but for all my searching I've only seen them three times, and those three times were within a hundred yards of the same spot. Go figure.

Can you see the owl in this picture?

It was a beautiful spring-like afternoon, despite being late January. We've had a little bit of rain, enough to bring on some grass growth, although it may fade early, as we are below 50% of normal precipitation and no storms are on the horizon. I decided to see what was happening at the Willm's Ranch stock pond, a prairie water hole that has provided some nice birding for us in the past.

I was on the road a mile or two south of the pond, where an ephemeral creek crosses the road. I first saw a Burrowing Owl there more than a decade ago. My pictures were limited by a 3x zoom on my primitive digital camera. The second sighting was much more recently, on April 2 of last year. My car startled the owl, which took off and landed a few hundred yards away in an alcove. I got a few less than perfect pictures, and put up a post anyway.

Today I spied the owl just a few dozen yards from the road, and it didn't move, much to my delight. I snapped lots of pictures this time around. Now to see if I can't locate a few elsewhere!

Burrowing Owl on the California Prairielands at Willms Road

The California prairielands used to extend in an unbroken band across the lower reaches of the Sierra Mother Lode and the four-hundred mile long Great Valley. Today 95% of the prairie has been plowed or paved over, and much of the rest has been preserved intact only because ranchers use the land for grazing. Such is the case for the Willms Ranch area south of Knights Ferry on the Stanislaus River, and east of Oakdale. It's privately owned, but the grasslands stretch for miles, and a handful of country roads provide access. It's a favorite spot for Mrs. Geotripper and me to go birding.

The funny thing about today's trip is an ongoing joke (but not really a joke) where I insist that this is the day that I'm finally going to see a burrowing owl and get pictures. I saw a Burrowing owl out there perhaps a decade or two ago, and we can't pass the spot without looking for another. But we never saw one again, despite birder reports of their presence in the area. Until today, that is.

I stopped as I always do at one of the ephemeral creeks that crosses the road, and I inadvertently flushed out a bird that I didn't immediately recognize. It was larger than any of the sparrows or meadowlarks we had been seeing, but was too small to be a hawk. I kept an eye on the bird and saw it land in the distance under an alcove. It was a hundred yards or more away, so the chances of seeing anything weren't great, but I upped the zoom and scanned the alcoves, and there it was: a Burrowing Owl!

The pictures aren't of my preferred quality, but they were enough to confirm the bird's identity. The Burrowing Owls (Athene cunicularia) range the length of the western United States all the way into South America. They prefer open grasslands, and their population has suffered as the grasslands have given way to development, either of the orchard kind, or the urban kind. Their name comes from their preference for burrows, either excavated by themselves, or the various other denizens of the prairie.

So next time, I'm going to be more careful about scaring birds! Maybe there will be some clear shots...