Who Killed That Owl??

Chet Baker and I have been making up for lost autumnal walks lately. On October 12, we ran Pontius Road, then nipped over by car to see what was doin' down on Dean's Fork.

Found an awesome pile of coy-wolf scat, fresh and hairy with raccoon:

That's a big animal. And a whole lotta poo. I forget myself and call them coyotes, but they're closer to wolves out East.  I try to imagine eating raw raccoon with the fur pelt on, and fail. Ugh! But the hair they ingest serves to clean out the digestive tract, much as grass does. They need it.

If you're intrigued by coy-wolves and their prodigious droppings: A little more info, and some of my photos, of who laid that great turd here

We were about to the car when I noticed a stray feather in the grass, one that had belonged to a raptor. I climbed a little rise under a power pole and found a kill scene!

Feathers were strewn everywhere. I could see by their softly fringed edges they were from an owl, and from their color and pattern that they had belonged to a barred owl. Whoa. What would kill a barred owl? I had my immediate suspicions. Let me walk you through my thought process in deducing the killer.

Initially, I was thrown off by the large splash pattern of the feathers, which suggested a mammalian predator such as a bobcat. They were scattered for about 12' around in a big circle.
The feathers were also quite bedraggled and wet, and had been torn out in great clumps. All suggestive of a mammalian predator. But it has been very dewy, so maybe it wasn't saliva that made them so disheveled.

The Bacon didn't think so.

What a mess! A bit of wing. I'm still thinking mammal at this point.

I pick up some wing feathers and examine the quill ends.

The ends are shorn off more or less cleanly, almost as if they'd been cut with a scissors. Or the sharp edge of a hooked bill. 

Had they been chewed off by a mammalian predator, they'd be compressed, flattened, and there would be tooth marks in them. I've swung back to thinking about an avian predator now. But the big splash pattern confuses me. Raptors tend to be neater in plucking than that. I look up and study the power pole above.

Aha! Stuck to a little relay box on the pole are two vital clues: the barred owl's stomach contents (a partially digested katydid), and a clump of plucked barred owl feathers.

I can see that these have fallen from high above and stuck on the plastic box.  Which explains the large splash pattern of feathers--they've drifted down from high above, and spread out. At this point I know that whatever killed that owl bore it up to the top of the power pole to pluck and eat it. So it has to be a bird. There's only one bird that can do that to a barred owl.

With my binoculars, I scan the top of the pole high above. My iPhone can't zoom very well, but that pale thing making an interruption in the shadow near the top is a gauzy buff body feather from a great horned owl, caught on the rough wood. I've got my perp. Great horned owls are hell on all other owls. They're the apex predator wherever they occur, and the first thing they do when they move into an area is clean out the barred owls. Tough but true. It happened on our land.

Lest you feel too sorry for barred owls, out in the Pacific Northwest, they clean out endangered spotted owls. Here they do in screech owls and saw-whets. They'd probably kill a long-ear too. It's a hard world out there, especially at night.

 Dean's Fork is down one barred owl, and up one great horned.

Case solved and closed, and a few more things learned, Chet and I trot for home.

These blazing blue and orange days are few and numbered, and we know it all too well.

Dead Deer, Live Deer, Vulture, 'Possum, Coy-wolf

In less than a week, the scavengers had reduced a deer carcass in our field to a torso and attached bones. They started at the haunch and kept going. A gray fox opened the haunch, eating most of one, and the vultures, who'd been waiting for an opening, gladly went ahead and finished the job.

Snow fell on the carcass, and this buck came by to investigate.

Everything in his mien said revulsion and apprehension--the pinned-back ears, the hunched back, the tentative steps. 

I figure he knew this young button buck.

He circled the carcass, kept coming back.

Finally he walked off, shaking his foot as if to rid himself of the feeling of coming upon one of his own, dead.

Others were much happier to discover the carcass.

I was elated to have a chance to finally get some decent vulture shots. I needed them for my new talk.

When the coy-wolves found the carcass, it went from food to bones overnight. 

At dawn, I found a fat opossum gnawing on it. And opossums being who they are, I was able to walk slowly out in the meadow, shooting as I approached. When he looked up at me I stopped, took a last photo, and walked back the way I came. He never left, just went back to his stanky breakfast.

What a gift this carcass was to so many animals. 

The next morning it was gone! But it wasn't hard to find...see the white dot in the woods border? And the trail of white belly hair leading all the way to it? Coy-wolves, dragging it into cover, not wanting to be spotted feeding. They're strong animals. I'm teaching myself not to call them coyotes any more. 

They're part eastern wolf. Just wrote an article for The Marietta Times called Coy-Wolves: Evolution in Action. 

This photo taken in our meadow a few winters back. Visually inseparable from an eastern (red) wolf. That's because he's got a big dose of those Canis rufus genes, from the interbreeding that went on between western coyotes and eastern wolves in northern Ontario. What we've got in the East is a genetically stable hybrid. Not a coy-dog. A coy-wolf. A new canid, longer of leg, bigger of foot, shorter and deeper of muzzle, smaller of ear and heavier of body and fur than the scrawny pale western coyote.

 And they live and feast and yammer and howl on our land every night. They den on the north-facing slope. So far, they have chosen not to kill Chet Baker, though I know they could in a heartbeat. And I'm grateful they have kept it to deer and rabbits, turkeys and woodchucks, voles and feral cats. I think about it every time I let him out to do his nightly business. And I think he does, too. He hurries back, flaps his ears, shivers. I spank him as he runs by, hug him, thankful each time that he comes back to crawl under the covers with me. Life in the country.

When I hear them howl I tuck what tail I have and run for the house!

The stash.

Every morning, a surprise. The turkey vulture's namesake, partying in the dawn light.

I'll miss my vultures. Must see if we can rustle up some more grub for them. 

You've heard the word catharsis. It refers to the relief, the cleansing collapse you feel after a big emotional event. 

Cathartes aura. The Golden Cleanser.