 Thanks very much for coming out on a Wednesday afternoon to talk about owls. All owls are welcome here, not just saw-wet owls, so we'll talk, so a lot of our research that happens at North Branch Nature Center is specific to this little saw-wet owl. It doesn't look so little on a screen like that. Can we knock the lights off, please? Knock them off! Knock them out! Yes. It makes sense to talk about owls in the dark, doesn't it? Yes. And I'm going to pass around a couple things before we get going, and I'm going to encourage these, these are owl wings, and I'm going to encourage these to go around a couple of times. One, the first time when you see them, just, you know, admire them, their camouflage and their coloration, their weight, their size. These are, these wings are from a barred owl. And then I'm going to talk a little bit later about some of the adaptations that owls have to be able to do what they do, to be able to be such effective predators, and some of those adaptations have to do with their wings. And so when the wing makes it back around to you, I'll look a little bit more closely, okay? So I'll start one right here, and I'll start one in the back. Now, no need to see both, they're both the same. One's left and one's right. All right, actually I'll pass around one other thing too. Oh, this will be fun. I'm going to pass around another wing that is not an owl, but looks like an owl. And so your job is to figure out when the wing comes to you on this side to figure out whether or not you're holding the owl wing or the other wing. So a little bit of a mystery. And one more thing I'll start on this side is the talons of a... I know I said I'd stand over there, but now here I am over here. So this is a talon of a barred owl, so you can get a sense of just how sharp they are. And so feel the tips carefully. And you'll also be able to feel that the edge of the talons as well are beveled to a sharp edge as well, almost like, not just like a spear, but like a knife edge. So now that you have things to play with, I'll start talking. So yeah, my name is Sean. I'm from the North Branch Nature Center. It's really lovely that I recognize many of you from over there. And so it's nice to see you in another context just down the road. So my goal tonight, or today, or I can't tell if it's day or night anymore, but our goal is to chat about owls and use the saw-wet owl as kind of a window into the behavior and ecology of really all the owls that we have, or at least most of the owls that we have here in Vermont. Because we do have a lot of different kinds of owls here in Vermont. We have a great diversity. And we'll talk about some of them. Some of them we will just kind of skip over because the odds of actually seeing one is very, very slim. So things like this guy up here, has anybody seen one of these? This is a northern hawk owl. No, it's long. I see a couple of hands going up. Congratulations. Congratulations. How long ago was it? About 10 years. There's one first great cross from Green Mountain Plum Headquarters. Oh, in Waterbury? Yeah. Yeah, okay. A fortune of more than four owls. Uh-huh. And Ruth, where did you see yours? Five years ago when it was along the river. Here? Middle sex. Oh, in middle sex. Okay, great. Yeah. So this owl is... We have owls that spend their whole life here, right here in Vermont. We have others that come from very far away. And when they come here, it's like being kissed by the Arctic tundra or something like that. And the northern hawk owl is probably an example of that, where it's this ghost from the north that shows up in Vermont. Maybe once every five years it'll show up and perch in a tree for three weeks outside of Green Mountain Club or on the random back road in Eden, which is where I saw one about 12 years ago. And then we have snowy owls. Who's seen a snowy owl before? Yeah, congratulations. And different habitat for snowy owls. Who's seen a snowy owl over at the Berlin airport? How about over in Addison County? So our snowy owls are another species that come from up north. They nest on the ground up in the Arctic tundra, and they spend their winters down here in the tropics of northern Vermont. And they're coming south looking for prey, looking for mice and voles that are up on top of the surface of the snow. But a lot of our other owls are a little bit more familiar to us. So raise your hand if you've seen one of these. This is a barred owl. Now for those of you that are less familiar with species identification of owls, I thought we'd start tonight before we get into the solid owl stuff. Just start with like the basic, there's really two owls you got to know. And if you're trying to learn your owls of Vermont, you really only need two. Because once you've learned these two, then you can decide whatever you're, if the owl you're looking at is one of them or not. And if it's not, then it's something really exciting. Well, they're all exciting. All owls are lovely. But most of the owls that we see are one of two kinds. And if you're looking at something that's not one of those two kinds, then you have something particularly rare in your hands. So the first one is a barred owl, B-A-R-R-E-D. So this is kind of the standard forest owl that we have in Vermont. And we find them in the woods. We find them at the edge of the woods. What else do we often find this time of year? Bird feeders. Hangin' out near bird feeders? Sure, sure. Where else? I see them a lot on power lines along forested roads. And especially, maybe not so much this year, but last year especially was a year that we saw a lot of barred owls. Not necessarily because there were a lot more barred owls, but because they were more visible to us. They were in places that we encountered them more. I think what, remember last year's snowpack was incredibly deep for much of, for really the whole, the snow never melted from November all the way through what, I don't know, July? Yeah, that's what I'm talking about. Over at the Nature Center, I remember in early November, there was a light snow and we had all sorts of stuff out in the grass that we intended to pick up and put away. And we thought, oh, we'll just, we'll just, once the snow melts, we'll go and get that stuff. Well, six months later, we were able to finally get that stuff. Anyway, that deep snowpack, it makes it difficult for owls, which hunt rodents, to be able to find their prey. And so these barred owls were coming to areas where they had a better chance at things than in their preferred habitat in the middle of the woods. So instead of seeing them in a habitat like this, we would see them next to our bird feeders going after birds or squirrels. And we'd see them along road cuts. We'll see them along road cuts, sitting on power lines, hoping that rodents are running across the road and they can go down and get them where there's areas where there's no snow. So no ears, no ears on this one. Dark black eyes that look like black holes staring through your soul. Beautiful barring pattern, and that's why it's called barred owl on the wings and on the tail, and you'll see that if you actually look at the wings that I'm passing around. And I'm going to play the important part since it's more often that we hear owls than we see them, right? I'm going to play you the song of the barred owl so that we can get on the same page about what our two best friend owls sound like. So barred owl is really common. You find them all over the place. This map here is a map of the most recent breeding bird atlas of Vermont. And this basically means that almost anywhere anybody looked for breeding barred owls, they found them. And the range extends from pretty much all across the eastern seaboard, from Florida all the way up. So pretty big distribution. Barred owl. Now, how about our great-horned owl? This is our other owl friend that we encounter quite a bit. And we know great-horned owls. We often see more plastic great-horned owls on the top of a roof than we see real ones. But they make these into plastic because those are the... You ask a four-year-old to draw an owl. They will draw a great-horned owl, right? They have that big, obvious facial, orange-facial disc. They have big, huge ears like this, right? No confusing that with a barred owl. And you see it, if you're lucky enough to actually see it in the flesh or in the feathers. But let's listen to what it sounds like, okay? So remember, who cooks for you? Who cooks for you all is the barred owl. So there's no cooking in that, right? It's very different. If an owl is saying hoot-hoot-hoot, it's a great-horned owl. If it's talking about cooking, it's a barred owl, right? So also, you heard in that recording that there's two different pitches, right? What was going on there? There was a call and response. It was a duet of a male and a female. Now, in owls, like almost all birds of prey, one member of the pair is much bigger than the other. Which one's bigger, male or female? A female is bigger. So which is the lower call? It's a trick question. Yeah, it's actually the male. It has the lower call, even though it's quite a bit smaller. Which was a surprise to me when I learned that, because I always thought the larger owl made the deeper sound. It would only stand to reason. But anyway, it's a... So you hear them duetting in the woods frequently. The barred owls who are talking about cooking, they'll do the same duets, where one will be higher, one will be a little bit lower. So anyway, so those... That's like if you... It's kind of like if you're trying to learn gulls. All you need to do is learn ring-billed gull and herring gull. Those are the only gulls you need to learn, because if you know those gulls, then you immediately know when you've found something different. Same thing with owls. If you know barred owl and you know great horned owl, then you can be confident that you'll be able to tell when you've found something that's not that. Oh, that's not one, right? Is that a barred owl or a great horned owl? So this is perhaps the cutest little bloodthirsty predator that's out there in the woods. And this is a northern sawed owl. That's life-sized. Now this is about the size of a soda can. Actually, it could fit comfortably in a soda can. And if I put one upside down in this cup here, it would be able to turn itself around and fly out in this cup. So they're small. And this is a species that we spent a lot of time at North Branch Nature Center studying. Has anybody been to our sawed owl banding program? Oh, that warms my heart. If you haven't, I invite you to join us some night in October when we're banding these little sawed owls and teaching folks about what's going on with our research there. Now we talk about great horned owls. We talked about barred owls. Although those are the two owls that we see the most of, this may be very well the most common predator of any kind in our forest. Who's seen one in the wild? In the wild. Not at the Nature Center. So we got a couple hands just went down there. Yeah, so like five or six or something like that. And congratulations if you have. I've been studying sawed owls for 11 years and I've never seen one in the wild that I hadn't gone to try to catch. So they're rare to see but they're very common. Last year during the migration season in the month of October, North Branch Nature Center, we caught something like 160 of them over the course of maybe banding on 15 or 20 nights. And let's hear what our sawed owl or fierce little sawed owl sounds like. It's the sound of a mouse's nightmares right there. So if you hear the sound of a truck backing up in the woods, you're listening to a sawed owl. And I've been confused in a delirious state. I've been standing like downtown Montpelier listening to like the walk signal turn on going beep beep and thinking oh there's a sawed owl around here somewhere. So it sounds very mechanical, right? But now that you know what that sounds like, be and you know if you're out and about at night in the woods, keep an ear out for that. It almost sounds like an insect, like a cricket or something like that. But if it's in the fall it's likely, or actually I should say it, if it's in the fall it's probably the Nature Center broadcasting that from the woods. If it's in the spring during the migrat- during the mating season, so like March, April, somewhere like that, it's it's you've found one. Sawed owls are pretty darn widespread, right? This kind of lighter purple color up top is their year-round range and then they kind of migrate farther south, ending up down here in this bluer colored stuff. This map isn't very accurate, but it gives kind of the gist of where you find these owls. And so I've spent time catching sawed owls at the Nature Center down in then down in New Pulse, New York, and also over here in outside of Boise, Idaho too. So on the left is our sawed owl adult, and on the right is a juvenile sawed owl. So if you are ever lucky enough to see a sawed owl and it happens to look like this, and not like the one on the left, then you should go buy a lottery ticket because you're very lucky that day because you found a juvenile owl. And if it's in those colors, it means that it nested nearby because by the time they get to us at the Nature Center in the fall, all the juveniles have already molted into their adult kind of feather pattern. So we never catch any owls that look like this juvenile, but they do have a nice look to them, don't they? Now, little public service announcement that's true for pretty much any bird, but I hear this a lot with these little owls because people see a sawed owl and they think, oh, that's a baby owl, right? It's tiny, so therefore it must be baby. But in fact, the adult sawed owl is so-to-can size. Well, as soon as the juvenile is on its own, it is also adult-sized, right? When birds leave the nest and they are no longer in the care of their parents, they are full-sized. They're the same size as their parents. In fact, with predators, they're often larger than their parents when their parents have sent them off on their own because imagine you are like two months old and suddenly you have to make a living by diving out of the sky and grabbing a mouse with your eyes closed, right? That's hard work. And it takes a lot of practice to be able to do that. And juvenile owls or hawks or any predator are not very good at hunting when it's their first try at it. And so parents will often make sure that they've provided enough food to the young to fatten them up so they have a little bit of credit to burn as they practice, right? Oh, well, their eyes aren't closed, but if we were trying to do this in the dark, we wouldn't be able to see because truly, they're hunting with their ears more so than with their eyes. So I don't know what happened to the body of this one. This is, so these solid owls are cavity nesters. And this looks like a, like a fir tree or something like that. But they're, they're cavity nesters and all they need to be happy in life is a cavity to nest in, in a closed-in forest somewhere. And well, so here's a picture of a juvenile owl on the left inside the cavity. And on the right, this is, you know, a, this is inside of a nest box here. But this is kind of what you could expect to see inside of that cavity. You know, lays somewhere between five and put up to like 10 eggs per litter. And you can see some mouse tails over here of things that have been pulled, you know, brought back in and some tail feathers. If you flip a soda can on its end, yeah, it's like the diameter of a soda can, something like that. Yeah, I think we use like three and a half or four inch, yeah, maybe three and a half, two and a half, maybe three or so inch holes in our nest boxes when we build nest boxes for this owl. So the great, so remember how that map of the distribution of this little guy is all across the country. And that means that it's a generalist. It can handle a lot of different types of forests and conditions. Really, it's happy in a hardwood forest, like, you know, up here in Richmond say, it's also just as happy up in the Rocky Mountains in the middle of a, you know, a spruce and fir forest. So it doesn't really matter what the forest type is, as long as there's tree cavities for to nest in, and as long as it has a food source. So this is actually a little mouse, but truly their diet is the red-backed vole. And you can see how this owl is just, gosh, perfectly built to do exactly this. Now let's look at the range map with the red-backed vole. And you'll see that the range of the solid owl's year round, the year round range of the solid owl very closely mimics where you find red-backed voles. I mean, that's no accident really. They are pretty much specialists on this red-backed vole because red-backed voles are the type of vole that is common in interior forests. So let's talk a little bit about the adaptations that these owls have for being able to do what they do in catch voles. So this picture I selected because it has this really great facial disc like this. That's what we call this edging of feathers around the eyes and the face of an owl. And this facial disc here, what's that for? I heard camouflage and that may, there may be some camouflage involved in it and certainly its whole coloration is to be cryptic but I saw some good gestures. Yeah, reflecting the sound, right? So that facial disc is like a radar. It's like a satellite dish that can trap sound as it's coming. And if we were to look behind, let's see if the slide is in order here, if we look behind that facial disc, well, we'll get there in it, let me see. Yeah, here we go. If we look behind the facial disc, this is looking sideways and now there's the beak, there's the back of the head. So this is the facial disc that's kind of peeled like this and that's the ear canal of the saw and owl. You see how imagine if your ear went from like the bottom of your jaw all the way up to like nearly the top of your head, right? That's what we're talking with. I saw it out with owls in general. Really big opening for the ear canal. And this is, you know, you can see how big those ear canals are in relation to the size of the skull as well. Now this picture here, of an owl skull is something that should give you pause. So when was the last time you saw a skull that was asymmetrical? I see how this part juts out down here and this part has a big bulb up here, right? So what we're looking at is kind of the bone structure around those ear canals. And what it's showing is that the ears are not symmetrical. One is set higher than the other and one is also set farther forward than the other, right? You can actually kind of make that out on the top down here at that one's a little farther back than this one. So if we are trying to catch dinner that we're chasing after as a human, so maybe let's say we're opening the fridge and there's a sandwich in there, for us to be able to successfully put our hand on that sandwich, we have two eyes that are able to triangulate the position of that sandwich in the fridge so that we know exactly how far away it is and that when we reach to it, we can grab the sandwich rather than reaching past it or our binocular vision gives us that depth perception. Well, this is like binocular hearing where if your ears are set asymmetrically, three-dimensionally asymmetrically, then sound is hitting one ear slightly before it's hitting the other and the owl's brain can determine exactly where in three-dimensional space that sound is coming from, right? Like if I were to ask you to close your eyes and I snap my fingers from different places in the room, you might be able to tell generally where the sound was coming from but you wouldn't necessarily be able to pinpoint exactly in this room right where that sound was coming from but an owl can to the extent that it can hunt these voles in total darkness even without having any sight available to it and under the snow, thanks. Yeah, so these little solid owls don't have a hard time breaking through the snow layer. They will do it if the snow is not very deep but you think about like a barred owl or a great gray owl or a snowy owl as they're hunting. You know, they're not able to see their prey, they're hunting it under under under snow. And I've heard from some friends at the Raptor Research Facility out in Wyoming that the statistic that they always like to share is that a great gray owl that is sitting over there by the door that we came in at can hear your heart beating inside your chest from over there. And so, you know, compared to that, it's nothing to be able to find a mouse moving around under snow making all sorts of noise under there, right? So now let's revisit those wings. So this is looking at the leading edge of the first flight feather of the owl. So in other words, we're looking along this edge right here of that feather or maybe this feather right here. So as we pass those wings around, take a look at that leading edge of the feather. And I don't know if anybody saw, but it has this little serration here. And if you look to the other wing, which is actually a turkey wing, you'll see it doesn't have that at all. What's the point of this serration along the leading edge of the flight feathers? That's a baffle, right? It's to dampen the sound, right? So if you imagine a jet flying past you, or like a raven or crow flying by you, right, you know, they, you know, when a crow flies past you close, it makes a big racket. It goes as it's flying by because air is ripping across the contact at that leading edge of the wing, right? As air is getting separated and some of it's flowing over and under that airfoil. On owls, there's that, this serration here that dampens that sound. It creates, it disturbs that. And so it doesn't kind of create this loud sound when the air breaks and goes on either side. It has a disadvantage of slowing down the owl so it can't fly very fast, but it can fly completely silently. When we do owl surveys, we go out into the woods and we, we play, we're trying to figure out what owls are in the area. We'll play a series of the calls, we'll play a saw what owl call, then we'll play a street owl, then we'll play a long-eared owl, then a short-eared owl, then a barred owl, then a great horned owl. Why am I, why do we play them in that order, not the other? So, so those owls go from smallest to largest, right? If we started with a great horned owl and worked our way down, then it would scare away everything smaller than it, right? Because one of the major predators of a solid owl is a barred owl. And a good predator of a long-eared owl is a great horned owl. So, you know, we start small on the worker way up when we're doing the surveys. We don't scare away whatever we're listening for. And also if we play a solid owl song, it sometimes has the added benefit of attracting whatever might eat it, right? Oh yeah, so the reason I bring that up is when we're doing these owl surveys, we play a call for 30 seconds or a minute. And then we just stand there to see if an owl comes in. And so many times we'll say, ah, yeah, well, nothing came in. We'll turn around to leave and it'll be an owl sitting right here next to us. That flew in without us even noticing because they come in so silently. So this is a little bit about what we do over at the Nature Center. I won't get into this too too much because you can come and see it for real if you join us in October. But we set up these nets out in the woods. And the solid owls are migratory, all right? Unlike the barred owls and great horned owls, solid owls migrate through Vermont. Some of them nest here sporadically, but generally speaking, most of the solid owls that wind up in Vermont are just passing through in the spring or the fall as they're moving up to the boreal forest to our north to the nest and moving south into the central appellations or farther south to spend the winter. So recognizing that, we go out into the woods and we set up these big nets that are about as tall as this room and each one of them is about 40 feet long. And we set up a big series of these in a big triangle. And in the middle of that triangle, we have a big loudspeaker that plays that sound of the truck backing up, the territorial call of the sawwet. And even though it's not mating season and these owls are not on territory, they're still intrigued by that and they come in to check it out. And they get caught in the net. And the nets are specially designed for this so that the owls fly in and safely get caught and held in place. And so we go to the net, we take them out, we put them in. These are tomato paste cans, by the way on the left. This is a little six pack of tomato paste cans to give you a size perspective. Oh, also, I always try to announce, we need your tomato paste cans. So if you're wondering what to do with tomato paste cans, please bring them over to the Nature Center. We would be happy to have tomato paste cans donated so we can create more owl caddies. So we bring them back to the Nature Center. We put a little metal band on their leg using some special pliers that crimp around it. Each one of these bands has a unique serial number. It is unique to that owl. And all of the data is centralized at the USGS Bird Banning Laboratory so that no owl, no bird anywhere in the world is going to have the same band number. So if anyone else encounters the bird, they can report the band number and then we'll hear about it. And other stations that I've worked at will take a little mouth swab to get some cheek tissues for a DNA analysis. And we'll use this to help figure out whether the owls are male or female. Yes, they do try to peck you. But it's not, the beak isn't so much, isn't really the dangerous part, right? It's the feet, yeah. I mean, you remember that picture of the owl coming in at the mouse? They have outsized feet for their body size and they're nice and sharp. And you can't use gloves when you're taking them out of the nets because the net is so fine that you need all the dexterity you can muster to remove it from the wings and everything. And so it takes some practice to learn how to... Imagine trying to give your cat a bath. It's like that but in the dark. But as you get better at it, you learn how to not get footed. But also these owls, they spend very little time around people. They spend most of their lives in places where people aren't up here. And so they're extremely docile for the most part. Most owls, they each have their own little personality but for the most part, they're all very docile when they end up in the net. It's almost like you approach them and they're just hanging out in this hammock. And we've just slightly inconvenienced them by taking them inside for half an hour to process. So it's really neat to... It's very, very rare that they struggle or anything like this. So it's totally safe for the owls. Okay. So this here is why this banning station that we have at the Nature Center actually works. It's because there are people doing the exact same research at the exact same time all across the... Well, all across the country but especially here across the Eastern Seaboard. And this is actually a pretty outdated image. This is back from like 2010. So there's a lot more dots on the map now. You'll see that we actually, the Nature Center isn't done here because our research station started in 2013, I think. But there's at least 150 to 200 people across the country that are doing this same exact research. And the wonderful thing about these owls is they live a fairly long time for a small bird and they travel great distances and they do it every year and they follow migration corridors. And so there's actually a decent chance that an owl that you catch will be captured somewhere else at some point or that you'll catch your own owl in subsequent years. So for my thesis work, I went over to the USGS bird banning laboratory. I asked them for every single instance of a sawed owl ever getting banded ever. And they said, here's an Excel spreadsheet of 200,000 rows. And I said, great, that looks like a thesis project to me. And so then I tried to make sense of it. And from that mess, I isolated all of the owls that had been... There's plenty of those were banded once and that's the last anyone ever saw that owl, right? The odds out, that's what's going to happen. But there's a small percentage that were banded again. So I isolated those birds and I drew a line between where it was banded and where it was recaptured. And this is what that map looks like. So you can see that owls are moving all over the place. You can also see where some of the larger research stations are that are actually doing the banding, right? So it's not that all of the owls hang out over here by McGill. It just happens to be that's where a big research station is. But anyway, you get the sense of how they're moving around. But that kind of is hard to interpret. It just looks like a box of spaghetti that you dropped on the table, right? And so we started asking questions of this to try to figure out, well, how are these owls actually moving? The whole reason we're doing this research in the first place is because this is an owl that everybody thought up until not too long ago, up until maybe 30 years ago, people thought was extremely rare, right? Because whoever sees these, like they're so unlikely to encounter, even though they're common in the woods at the right time of year, you just never encounter them. And so we thought they were endangered and there was motion tours actually listing them as endangered species. But then in reviewing some old records and reports, somebody noticed that back in like 1906, there was a case of somebody noticing like 25 or something solid owls washed up along the shores of Lake Superior on one beach. And so the researcher thought, well, if they're that rare, how could you end up with 25 of them on one beach and one night? And realized that, well, maybe they're not as rare as we thought, maybe we're just not looking in the right way. And so these research stations popped up and we started asking just these really basic questions about the biology of this bird. Where does it live? What does it do? Where is it going? And why is it going there? And how does it get back and forth? And so just using this banning data, we can start to ask those questions. Now, making this a little bit more relevant to the Nature Center, these are, this is that this same map, but only extracted so that we're seeing the birds that have been banded and recaptured just right here in Mount Pilar. So each one of these lines is a bird that was either banded at North Branch and recaptured somewhere else or banded somewhere else and recaptured at the Nature Center. So you can see that these birds are getting around. Now, I should also mention that these birds are not necessarily banded and recaptured in the same year. And so it might be that a bird is banded in 2017 in one spot and recaptured in 2018 somewhere else. So like this Stevens Point, Wisconsin bird did not fly 2000 miles west from here to there. It was moving south, probably wintered down here, and then migrated back up north to nest somewhere up here and then came down on its fall migration and then got caught. So we're kind of catching it on two different years. But for the most part, you can kind of make out that this is an outlier compared to this stuff. See that? So we tried to quantify that a little bit and look at, well, how are these owls moving? Oh, yeah, there's that. This is an owl on a tomato paste can. Why not? Okay, so we started asking some questions about this banding data. The first one we asked is, all right, when did they actually migrate? We go looking for them in October, but what does that look like across all of the eastern seaboard? So what we did was we basically took, we made this ladder across the whole east coast, and each one of these bars is like two degrees latitude, and we looked at how many birds were banded within each one of these rungs of the ladder, right? And each one of these dots here is basically a banding station, and the larger the dot, the more birds are caught at that banding station. And what we did is we looked at the average day of the year that birds were banded in that run of the ladder, and this is what we got, where the banders that are working up north, they're getting their peak migration. So like, you know, if you imagine migration as being this bell curve of activity of birds moving through a region, that peak of that bell curve is around October 1st, up in southern Canada, and it's hitting us in about mid-October, October 15th or so, which is why we do all of our northern saw-wad owl public banding demonstrations on that week. At the Nature Center, because they have the highest likelihood of catching a bunch. And they continue moving south, and by the time they get down to Southern New York, you know, it's late October, and down here in November, and the birds that do make it all the way down into, many of them just stop here, right? But those that are banded way down here aren't showing up there until mid-November or even early December. So just the simple analysis of this banding did is able to give us information like this that actually shows the front of that migration as it moves across the country. Okay, then we had another kind of basic bird biology question that we asked. Do males and females migrate differently? So take red-winged blackbirds, right? When do we see red-winged blackbirds show up back in Vermont? March. And when do we see the female red-winged blackbirds show back up? Later, they're wise, and they know that if they show up in, the females, if they show up in March, then they're going to hit with a snowstorm. And there's not going to be any food to eat. There's no insects to eat in March, for the most part, in our marshes. And so the males all migrate back, and they stake out territories, and then they wait for the females to arrive back at a more sensible time, right? And so there's this differential migration between male and female red-winged blackbirds, and this is true of a lot of different species of birds. And we wanted to know, are these sawed owls doing the same thing? All right, these sawed owls are their cavity nesters, again, right? But the male will go and find cavities, and then when the female shows up in the territory, the male will escort her around saying, hey, how about this hole? How about that cavity? Like this one? And together they'll pick a cavity to nest in, that sort of thing. So territory matters, territory quality matters, and we wanted to know if that was born out in how the males and females are migratory. So we took all that banning information and used that latitude ladder again, and what we looked at was the male-to-female ratio of birds caught on average at each one of these latitude bars. And without getting into it, into like the way into the weeds here, just know that most of the birds that we kept capture are females across the board. We, it's rare, somewhat rare to capture a male, but maybe at the Nature Center last year of the 160 birds that we caught, there was maybe just a handful that were definitively males. And it's true across everywhere that you're always going to catch more females at the stations, but the bluer the band, the darker the blue, the higher proportion of males. And so this is like 0.3 to 1, so like what, three males for every 10 females up in Canada, whereas down here we're looking at two or one and a half males for every 10 females down here. And this bar here is just kind of weird outlier, I don't know. But you look at the same information on a good old XY graph, and what you see is that the higher the latitude you are, the more likely you are to capture more males. And so we think, okay, well that's awesome. So the males perhaps aren't migrating as far south as the females. They're sticking farther north so that when it's time to migrate back to hold down territory in the spring, they don't have to go as far, right? If a male goes way down here to winter and expects to make it up and claim the best possible territory way up in Lake Superior the next spring, it has a long way to go. And by the time it gets there, it's going to be way behind the A-fall, right? And so it's neat that this data here bears out that these males are actually moving differently than the females. This is just kind of showing similar information in a different way of male-to-female ratio across space using some fancy GIS analysis. What we also did was we asked the same question of adults and juveniles. So do we capture the same ratio of adults to juveniles at the banding stations? And what we discovered is that there is a lot of variation in how many juveniles proportionally are caught at all these different banding stations. And we decided that we cannot figure out heads or tails about why that is and we cannot figure out the pattern of this, but it does seem like there is some differential movement between adults and juveniles. So that's kind of neat. So this is a really cool question that we try to ask also using this information. Remember that box of spaghetti diagram? We try to make sense of those lines of where birds are banded and where they're recaptured to figure out are these solids, are they following the same migration routes from year after year? Or are they coming down one place one year and then going up in different direction and coming down somewhere else? Are they holding to a particular migration route? So what we did is we looked at, in terms of a compass rose, the direction that piece of spaghetti was pointing and the longer the line, the higher proportion. So we're seeing that, okay, there's a general trend of their move into that direction. That's not terribly surprising, but it was a fun graph to make. And so then we try to get at this question of, are they using the same migration routes by doing this? So imagine this owl here is up in Canada and then down here is Carolinas. Okay, so year one, fall comes, the owl migrates, and it comes down this particular direction here and it gets caught at a banding station at 40 degrees latitude, over here in, let's say like Pennsylvania, all right? And then it continues on its way, winter's here, it comes back up. The next year it comes down from Canada and it gets caught around that same 40 degrees latitude, but it gets caught over in New Jersey instead of Pennsylvania, right? And so our question was, if a bird is banded and recaptured at the same latitude in different years, what's the average amount of space between the two points, right? So if a bird is banded and recaptured on that same rung of the ladder in different years, is it recaptured very close to where it was banded or is it captured way far away? And this is the incomprehensible graph of that. But this is the thing that makes more sense, which is this is the percent of all the birds that are banded and recaptured, and this is the distance on the bottom here between where the bird was banded and where the bird was recaptured in kilometers. So in other words, 30% of the birds are recaptured within 20 kilometers of where they were originally banded. 70% of the birds were banded within 50 kilometers, 80% within 100 kilometers, and almost all of them within 300 kilometers. And as I put these words up here, just for a reference, 20 kilometers is the difference distance between Waterbury and Montpelier. 50 kilometers is between Burlington and Montpelier. So this is a bird that's moving potentially from Northern Canada to South Carolina, and odds are very, very high that it's going to follow a migratory corridor that is only at most the width of Montpelier to what I say, Burlington and Montpelier, right? So we say, okay, isn't that neat? These birds are following the same migration corridors from year to year. That's fun when we look at the actual data point, or like at massive data, but it's even more fun when we have anecdotal evidence of a bird that you actually caught. This year at the Nature Center, we recaptured this bird that was, I think it was 110434596 with its name, and we recaptured it in 2019. It was recaptured at our banding station the same week of 2018, and it was banded at our station that same week of 2017, right? Yeah. This is just showing a couple graphs of just the total number of owls that we banned on a given night. We put this in, we made these graphs mostly just to have some fun, not particularly because they're that useful, but showing our total captures per year. So in our first year, we caught 60 birds, 120 the next year, 140, boom, down to 20 birds in 2016. So you know that just, there's a peak and there's a drop-off, right? This is, there's a four-year, four or five-year annual cycle of the saw an owl population. About every four years, there's a big boom, and then the next year, there's a big bust, and that's reflected in the banding activity that we see at all of our stations. What would contribute to the boom and the bust of the saw an owl population? The red vole population, yeah, okay, great. So that's fine, but what is, so okay, so you're under the next piece, yeah. So why does the vole population go up and down then? The food source. And what's actually happening is there's a four to five-year cycle of the cone crops of the spruce and fir trees in Canada and the boreal forests. And so when there's a big boom year and all the trees are fruiting or have their cones, then that makes for a really big rodent population. And so when there's a big rodent population, there's a lot of baby owls that can survive and make it because there's food everywhere. And then the next year, that food is all consumed. A lot of those young birds die. The rodent population has crashed because of the abundance of predators. It's like the classic, like if you remember the links and snowshoe hair oscillation graph from biology textbooks. It's like that, but it's with owls and bulls and tree cones. But anyway, so we definitely see that more now here too. You see just some ideas of how many owls we catch on a night. So it's a single night at the nature center. It's really common to catch seven, eight, nine, 10 owls. We often have nights, if the wind is just right, if the weather is just right, that we can catch 25, 27. Like our record is 56 birds, not a lot. Our record at the nature center is like 27 birds. And the record down in New York at a station that worked out was like 56 birds in a single night. And kind of one of the final things that we looked at that was kind of interesting is the simple question of how long did these birds live, right? How old can saw what owls get? And so we just looked at how on average, how many years is it between when the bird is bedded and when the bird is recaptured, right? And what we see is this kind of age spectrum where 17 of the recaptured birds are abandoned and recovered in the same year. 37% of them are one year later, 25% two years later, 12% three years later, 6% four years later, 2% five years later. So you're starting to see that a bird that is one, two, or three years old is pretty common. But it's harder and harder and harder to find a bird that is four, five, six, seven years old. The record is an 11-year-old bird in the wild. But so anyways, this kind of banning recapture information is able to paint a picture of just how long these birds live in the wild, right? Oh, thank you. Yeah, so Ruth asked, how do you age these birds in the first place? Well, I don't know if it'll show up on the barred owl wings, but we could look at it later if once we do have the lights back on maybe. But the owls, they molt their flight, all birds molt their feathers, right? But they don't molt them randomly, they molt them in predictable ways. And they molt feather tracks kind of all at once. Now their flight feathers, they molt from the, essentially from the, I think it's the inside out and it's synchronous. And so if they lease the feather here, they'll also leave that same feather there on that side. And so if you ever look up in the sky and you see a vulture flying around, that looks like it has two symmetrical holes in its wings. That's because it's in the middle of its molt and that's how far it's gotten on its molt so far. And if you were able to keep watching that vulture, you'd see that gap get progressively farther and farther out. So most birds, especially songbirds, are able to get through their whole wing molt in one year. And that's just kind of how they evolved to molt their feathers. They just do it all in one year pretty quickly in sequence. Solid owls, they take more than two years to finish that whole sequence. And so if we catch a bird and all of the feathers look exactly the same, then we know it hasn't even begun its molt. So we know it's a juvenile bird who was born that spring. If we catch a bird where we can see that half of the feathers look new and the other ones look old, then we know that's a bird that has started but hasn't completed its molt. And so that's a one year old bird. If we capture a bird that has a gradation between new feathers, old feathers, new feathers, old feathers, and that's a bird that has made it through most of its first molt and is even starting again on the second molt, on a second round of molt. And so that's a two year old bird. And you can, with some scrutiny, tell a three year old bird but that's about as much as you can get. So some birds we can just tell their age, at least zero, one or two. After that, then when we recapture a bird, we can go and ask the bender how old it was when they captured it. So even if we recapture a bird and we have no idea how old it is, if the bender said, oh, we banded that six years ago and its wing pattern was that of a second year bird, then we know, okay, well, yeah, two to six and that's an eight year old bird. We have not caught an eight year old bird but you get the idea. So anyway, you can use molts to be able to age the bird. We can use the size of the bird, how much it weighs, to be able to tell whether it's male or female. That's why there is an owl in the tomato paste can upside down, not just for fun, but we put them in there to weigh them on the scale. So that's why we have that tool is to weigh them. So we use a combination of their weight and their wing lengths to be able to tell whether they're male or female, I should say. Okay, cool. So that's kind of where I want to stop because I want to leave some time for you all to ask any owl related questions you might have. So we can pop the lights back on and thank you all for listening to me talk about owls. The question is why do the owls come to our call when we're broadcasting for them? And that's a question that we don't have a good definitive answer for where we have a lot of suspicions. One is that they're just curious, right? They're migrating through and they hear a territorial call of their own species and they got nothing better to do so they just come down and check out what's going on. It could also be more that it doesn't matter what time of year it is, female owls will be drawn to that sound because it is the territorial sound of that bird. It's that sound is used for males to be able to advertise their territory and males will use that to defend their territory. And so it could just be an instinctual thing of like you hear that sound, you go check it out. It happens to be at the wrong time of year but maybe it doesn't matter because you don't hear that sound from the birds themselves in the fall. They're not making those noises. Why? Well, if you're a tiny little bird and you're making this racket in the woods, that's a great way to get found by a barred owl. So it doesn't benefit the males or it doesn't benefit an owl to make noise if it doesn't need to, especially if it's small. So it could be that they're always wired to listen to the sound but they're only wired to make the sound when it benefits them, right? One of the questions that we have about this sound also is generally in nature there's almost always a 50-50 sex ratio of male to female and something really weird has to happen with the evolution of that species and its behaviors to end up with a sex ratio that's not 50-50 and so it's just, it's generally fine to assume that in reality the ratio of male to female sawed owls is probably 50-50 and so why do we get so many females and not males then? So our two thoughts for this are one is that the males don't, well, part of what we know is that the males aren't migrating as far south, right? They're sticking farther north so that accounts for some of it but even up there it's still female, biased in a big way and so we think, okay, maybe the females are particularly drawn to this because they're attracted to this really loud male sawed sound and it could also be that the males are actually frightened by this or are repelled by the sound because they're listening to the sound of an owl that is louder than any other sawed owl they've ever heard. It is the meanest, biggest, baddest sawed owl they've ever come across and so it could be male avoidance and it could also be female preference but together that ends up giving us mostly female owls at the net. So that's a territorial call that you use? Yeah, it's a territorial, it's so the same, the same call like songs with other birds that it serves multiple functions, you know the bird song will at the same time advertise territory to females and it will also advertise to defend that territory against males. Do they make a lot? Do they made for life? I don't think we have an answer to that question actually. Many long-lived birds do make for life or mostly make for life. We have great records of eagles and ospreys and this sort of thing nesting and puffins actually have, there's the National Audubon Society's Project Puffin always does this big press release on Valentine's Day about their puffin pairs because it'll be like oh yes like these two puffins have been raising chicks together for 45 years or something like that. And so many birds do make for life but with these little, and many owls do too but we just, I don't think we know yet about the little sawed owls. How often do you come back to just continue the call because you're going into predator owls competing right off the net? Yeah so we, the question was do we ever have to stop our station because as a barred owl that's at the Nets and we, our goal is to stop the station before the barred owl gets to the sawed owl and so fortunately the barred owls announced that since they're big they have, they, it doesn't matter if they make, they can make noise whenever they want nothing's going to eat them, right? And so they're not as, as quiet as the small sawets and so if barred owls are in the area they're usually very vocal and so we can hear from the nature center if there's a barred owl calling in the woods and we'll do much more regular net checks to go down there every 15 minutes and try to figure out how close that owl is and if the owl doesn't move off then, then we'll close the Nets for the night Also sometimes we catch the barred owl in the net and that's a great deterrent against catching barred owls in the net you know if you, if you catch the, if you catch an owl in the net it, it generally isn't going to want to go to that area again and it's not going to find the sound of a sawed owl all that appetizing anymore and so we actually sometimes try to encourage the owl into the net so that we can, we can bend it and let it go so that it's had that experience yeah yeah You're knowing a lot of birds are decreasing in numbers and some species are going extinct What's the sound of the call? Yeah so the question was about species decline and just general population decline and a lot of bird species and many of you may have seen the New York Times article that was referencing lots of studies showing that there's about a third less birds in the woods now than there were 30 years ago and, and you know we hear different examples of this sort of sort of stuff way too frequently Breaking that down a little bit looking at well who are we missing in the woods species that migrate long, long distances to far away places are so like warblers and fly catchers and things like that those swallows you know those are the types of species that we're seeing definitely seeing a lot fewer of those because you know you can do all you want with habitat conservation you know up in the breeding grounds and we all know how difficult that is to begin with well who knows what's possible in terms of habitat conservation on their wintering grounds right so they have all these added pressures these migratory birds of having to not only find a good suitable habitat here but also be the same thing down in you know Haiti or Yucatan or something like that right and so and then they have to actually get back and forth which requires a lot of luck and a lot of food along the way and all this um generally speaking species of birds that spend their whole life in one place here like all of our feeder birds for instance you know they're not they're doing just fine right they're able to find all the food they need they're able to they're not making these these big treks and as far as we can tell solid owls follow the latter category where you know they are really common resident birds that don't they're not very specialized they don't really need very much to be happy they need a tree cavity in the woods and some mice to eat and that's good and that's all they need and um and so as far as we can tell saw what owl populations are very stable and um and I would wager that owl at least the owls that we have in Vermont owl populations in general in Vermont are pretty stable saw wet what the heck does that mean? saw wet so S-A-W I think W-H-E-T apparently when you sharpen a saw on a wet stone it goes do-do-do-do-do right and so it's supposed to be the sound of the the sound of the bird is supposed to be the sound of the wet stone because the you can't call out the the truck backing up owl right I actually have two questions one what information do you get from the DNA besides the sex and the second question is I'm happy occasion unfortunately to dissect owl pellets do all owls produce pellets? so um the I'll start with the second question do all owls make pellets? I believe all the owls that we have here do make pellets right so they eat whatever rodent or bird that they've snacked on for dinner and um and birds have a you know additional organ called a gizzard right that that is kind of like a way to crunch and process food before it reaches the stomach and so so that's why owls make pellets is they've partially digested a bunch of stuff and they just regurgitate the bones and the feathers and the hair out of that so it doesn't pass all the way through their system and and you know complicate the the works there your first question was about DNA and what information do we get out of the DNA in addition to the sex of the bird and and really for our purposes all we were trying to get out was the sex of the bird we do have a system that we can use to measure the wing length of the bird and the weight of the bird and that combination of those two can tell us if it's a male or a female so if it's really big it's a female if it's really small it's a male but there's a lot of overlap in there and one of the studies that that we did was looking at that the nature of that overlap there's a lot of birds that we just have to call unknown because they fall in the middle and so we just kind of as researchers generally we would just been writing off these owls unknown unknown unknown and so we actually did the DNA analysis to go back and look at those unknown those birds that were labeled unknown by the morphometric analysis and say well were they male or female definitively and what we found is that if you are put into the unknown category it is much more likely that it was a male that you couldn't categorize than it was a female that you couldn't categorize and so part of the reason for this this difference in in a proportion of sexes at the banding station it's a little exaggerated because if it's an unknown bird it is actually there's a higher likelihood of it being male than female and so it's actually we're under reporting the males unless we have DNA evidence to conclusively say it but most people don't collect DNA because it's a little bit more invasive on the birds any other questions over here yeah quick question you're using metal presumably on the banding that are issued with one bird even though it's just metal and you know we're kind of metal oh yeah so the the bands are made of aluminum and the bands are always small and they're sized for that size of bird and I never been asked the question about what happens if something eats that bird what happens to the band and the band actually just passes right through whatever predator ate it and you know you figure like these birds are eating bones and things like that and so that the bands do pass through it I'm not sure that I've never heard of any complications of a predator eating a banded bird because you'll find you know like you find like candidate geese bands in a pile of feathers you know on the side of river sometimes we're like an eagle ate it and so you do see that sometime and some of the a lot of the bands that are actually reporting out of saw wets but of other birds bands that are reported are bands that are picked out of a pile of feathers or you know a pile of scat or something like that or a pellet you know there's a question over here yes do you want to know if you find a band yes yes so if you ever do find a bird band you can report it and you can actually go there's a whole there's a portal online where if you find any bird of any species any any bird been of any species you can go there I think it's the most usgs bird bending lab and they make it very easy to find it's this page where you type in the band number that you found and if you know anything else about the bird like if if you just find the band that's all you have but if you put in the band number you could put in oh this was on a robin if you know the species just corroborate but you hit a button you put in your email address and they'll actually email you a little certificate that says this is who you reported it was banded here on this date by this person it's this species yeah so one and so speaking of that one of the things that we do at the nature center is we do an adopt an owl program where you can symbolically you can't take it home you symbolically adopt an owl and so when we ban the bird we write down your name next to it and your information and if that bird is ever recaptured by us or by any other bander in the country we'll know about it and we will send you a little certificate saying what your owl is up to right so it's a great it makes a great great little holiday gift and a good way to support our research too I have two questions the first is about the migration and the iconic image of migration is geese as a bee I don't think that it's not what I always do that but do they travel as a group and how does this actually work oh that's that's such an interesting question so the question is are these owls migrating alone or together so you read any textbook you talk to anybody and they'll say oh yeah these owls travel alone why would they travel together they're not pack hunters there they have no reason to be traveling together right but I tell you sometimes on a you know like a night at the nature center we'll be sitting there and we check the nets every 45 minutes to an hour we go down and see what we've caught and I tell you sometimes we'll go down and we'll have nothing nothing nothing nothing five hours we'll go by no birds and then the next chat will be three birds right next to each other in the same net and tell me those birds weren't moving together right I wish there was a way to quantify that so now it's just a fun mystery but I suspect that they are actually moving together whether they're family groups of you know adults and juvenile birds I don't know no nobody's seen so when they and when they do migrate they're not up in the sky flying like a goose they're just leapfrogging from tree to tree you know slowly working the way south as the weather allows so remember that that that map of all the rainbow colors like it takes them two whole weeks to wander their way from you know from the north part of Vermont to the south part of Vermont right so they're not going very fast they're just moving opportunistically working in their way slowly south so yeah they eat them about a mouse a night yep or a vole a night I should say yep how only do the barn owls live how long do they live to down I'm taking a the question is how will do barred owls live and I'm going to take a guess here because I don't know definitively but I would I would guess with some reasonable measure of accuracy that they could live between 15 and 20 years what's the nursing behavior between all with with the females and males so with owls so how involved the male and the female are in and raising young totally depends on the species with owls the male and the female are both providing I'm trying to actually remember now with saw wets if if so the female incubates the male provides food what I can't remember is if the male also incubates and the female also provides food if they trade off both duties or if it's if it's the male providing mice and also once the once the young are old enough to be able to thermoregulate on their own they don't need to be sad on anymore and so both parents will will be doing food runs constantly we should have a lot in songbirds well all birds too where you know one parent might be tight to the nest or they might share the duty of of incubating and thermoregulating the chicks but once they're old enough and they're a little bit larger than both parents will be feeding the feeding the chicks so with with the saw what owls what that looks like is every once in a while a vole is dropped into the into the cavity and then you know the chicks tear it apart or the parents will break the vole into pieces and defeated the chicks do you have one more question one more question yeah so again yeah slide there with five or six little eggs in there how many of those about chicks will survive that's a good question so how many chicks will survive from the eggs that are laid and that's another question that I don't know that we have great information on because it's really hard to study that stuff because you need saw what owls don't like nest boxes very much we put up a hundred nest boxes in new paltz we had zero saw what owls using anything even though it was a spot where we caught you know 50 plus in a single night so so the data is limited there but it also depends on how many rodents are available to be feeding the chicks right but it would be totally reasonable for of all those eggs for there to be three or four young that that survived to to mature survive to kind of fledging and independence thank you everybody