Short-eared Owl Afternoon

 I love the Ohio Ornithological Society's annual Raptor Extravaganza at The Wilds each January. It's a way to get together with friends in a lovely setting and collectively freeze your kiesters off. Together. It's a bonding thing.

Phoebe and Liam dine on fresh snow while we pound a pine grove for roosting owls.  I love taking our kids on this trip each year. Together, they're a unit of contentment, happy to look at what we show them in the scope, but equally happy to just be in The Wilds.

There are other kids who come, too; this one too little to stick up above the Lespedeza.

Part of The Whipple Bird Club. We were missing Shila, but Marcy's smile made up for it.

I forget what Mrs. Claus is supposed to be doing if it's snowing when the sun is shining. Do you remember, Steve?

Maybe best not to ask. Carol (right) obviously didn't get the memo that it was Dorky Hat Day. Shhh. Be vewwy, vewwy quiet. Steve and Mawcy are wooking fow wabbits.

I like to shoot pictures of people out birding. Dave looked great in the taupeness with the sunny snowflakes drifting down.

We feel so lucky to have a place like The Wilds less than an hour from our house. A place where you can see for miles and scan for raptors. It's hard to do that at home. Too many trees. 

No such problem here. You see, when the place was strip-mined in the '70's, they took away the soil that could support trees. The subsoil that's left makes stunted, twisted little things that look more like shrubs. So it's going to be open land for the foreseeable future. 

Which is a great thing for short-eared owls. SEOW's come here from the far north, and only in winter (though a few have tried nesting each year). They're looking for voles and mice. It looked to us like a great vole year at The Wilds, with dark little sausage-shaped food packets skittering to and fro on the snowy paths before us as we walked. Their tunnels and tracks were everywhere! That spells a fat winter for owls.

Largely crepuscular, a short-ear has no fear of flying during the daylight. They're tough birds. We accidentally spooked this gentleman from his ground roost right by the road and up he started with the classic mechanical mothlike wingbeats that quicken a birder's heart.

 Phoebe spotted him right away and she and I tried very hard to get a line of five slowly moving cars stuffed with birders to stop and see this wonder of the north. Everybody saw it well! I must've yelled SHORTEAR SHORTEAR SHORTEAR a dozen times.

Phoebe made a mental note of where she'd seen him start up and went over to ground-truth her suspicion.

 She found the spot and lo! there was a puddle of fresh shortear poo where he'd been sleeping.

and she was not ashamed to be very excited to have found that

which warmed her mama's heart.

Speaking of warm hearts, Liam spent the entire day with Savannah, his sixth-grade teacher's daughter, playing and talking and acting goofy.

 Savannah thinks Liam hung the moon, with good reason. He is unfailingly patient and kind to small children and they adore him for that. 

It helps that Savannah is purely adorable.

She brings out the caretaker in him.

 After everyone had finished high-fiving, the ones for whom short-eared owl was a life bird did the Life Bird Wiggle. This is mandatory if Bill of the Birds is around.

We felt blessed to see about a dozen of these beautiful owls, more and more as night fell.

Same shot, but cropped so you can see the fabulous rufous wing patches and something of its face.

There's nothing quite like showing people their first flying owl. It's been an owly winter for us!