Barred Owls, Part 2

A few odds and ends to follow up on my post about Barred Owls from two days ago.

A nice framed print of Audubon's rendering of the Barred Owl is among the numerous bird images that hang in our home. It's a decent copy of the engraving that appeared in Audubon's magnum opus, The Birds of America. 

The image depicts the owl poised to nab a gray squirrel, one of his favorite menu items. The squirrel seems to be unnaturally cooperative, just sitting there, waiting to be snatched up. While it is true that Audubon took some flak for portraying scenes that were not always scientifically accurate, in this instance the fault may lie not with him, but with Robert Havell, the English engraver who transformed Audubon's original art works into images for the printed page. In Audubon's original painting there is no squirrel:

 

Audubon rendered the squirrel separately, and Havell combined the two images when he did the engraving. The original painting of the squirrel was, I believe, of a single animal, but it was used yet again in Audubon's second great work, The Quadrupeds of North America, with a companion added to the composition:

Audubon wrote of the Barred Owl [in his Ornithological Biography] that it "...is found in all those parts of the United States which I have visited, and is a constant resident. In Louisiana it seems to be more abundant than in any other state. It is almost impossible to travel eight or ten miles in any of the retired woods there, without seeing several of them even in broad day; and, at the approach of night, their cries are heard proceeding from every part of the forest around the plantations." [Text and images taken from the site Audubon Images.] 

Many other writers talk of the Barred Owl's relative abundance. Arthur Cleveland Bent, in his Life Histories of North American Birds of Prey, characterizes it as "our commonest large owl." Bent describes some of its habits: "It is a forest-loving bird, living mainly in the deep, dark woods, heavily wooded swamps, gloomy hemlock forests, or thick growths of tall, dense pines, where it spends most of the day in the quiet seclusion of its shady retreats. In such resorts it is seldom disturbed, but when its haunts are invaded it is not caught napping; it often greets the intruder with its weird hooting notes and flies about quite actively, even in broad daylight. Much of its hunting is done in the open country and about the farms, and in fall and winter it occasionally ventures into the villages and even into cities in search of food. "

Although modern ornithologists recognize only a single species of Barred Owl, given the Latin name Strix varia, in Bent's time [1937-38] there were thought to be two distinct species: the Northern (Strix varia varia) and Florida (Strix varia alleni). I do not know when the two were collapsed into one.

The Barred Owl has not just been the subject of painters and photographers, but of poets as well. Distinguished American poet Richard Wilbur has written of calming a young girl's fears engendered by hearing an owl's cry, in his poem, "A Barred Owl." The text, and an audio file of the poet reading his own work, can be found at the Poetry Archive. 

Then, of course, the bird's name itself has great literary connotations! Once, following a birding expedition on which I'd seen a Barred Owl, a friend who is an English professor and birder himself, asked if I'd seen any good birds. I told him that the most interesting thing I'd seen had been a "Shakespeare owl."  He didn't get it... 

Lots more information about all sorts of owls can be found on The Owl Pages. I've just barely begun to explore them. For a lovely online presentation of all the images from Birds of America, check out this virtual catalog from the Musée de la Civilisation in Montreal.

Pair o' Pileateds!

I love the view out our home office window. We look out onto our woods, and since the office is on the second floor, and the land slopes away from the house, we have a good view into the upper parts of most of the trees. During migration season it's a great vantage point from which to spot a lot of warblers that might otherwise go undetected. A Cooper's Hawk has on occasion landed in the trees right outside my window, giving me the chance to engage in an eyeball-to-eyeball staring contest with him. In winter, with the leaves off the trees, the visibility is excellent. A couple of feeders hang by the deck that's below my office window, so I get to see a lot of chickadees, nuthatches, titmice, goldfinches, and small woodpeckers on their way to and from the lunch counter.

Late this morning, as I was staring vacantly out the window [an important part of the writing process!] I saw something large in one of the trees about midway between our house and the neighbor's. I grabbed the binoculars that live beside me on my desktop and quickly confirmed that I was seeing what I'd hoped it was--a Pileated Woodpecker! Sally quickly joined me, and it was not long before we realized that there was not one, but two woodpeckers on the same tree!  We've seen and heard Pileateds here before, but very infrequently, and not for some time.

We both ventured downstairs and out onto the deck for a better view. Took awhile to find the birds, but one showed itself again fairly quickly and we got some superb looks as it kept hopping from tree to tree. It worked its way around to the northeast end of the house, near where our suet feeders hang. We were hoping he/she would find the feeders, but no such luck. We never did see the second bird again, though we could hear it hammering.

We hope that they'll come around more often. There are numerous dead trees in the woods, some of which show signs of having been visited by Pileateds in the past. We deliberately do not make any effort to clean up these trees as they serve as food depots for numerous critters.

Our visitor this morning never came close enough for me to get any photos, so I'll have rely on Audubon for an illustration:

Audubon writes fairly extensively of the Pileated in his Ornithological Biography. I quote a small portion of his entry [taken from the site Audubon Images]:

While in the Great Pine Forest of Pennsylvania, of which I have repeatedly spoken, I was surprised to see how differently this bird worked on the bark of different trees, when searching for its food. On the hemlock and spruce, for example, of which the bark is difficult to be detached, it used the bill sideways, hitting the bark in an oblique direction, and proceeding in close parallel lines, so that when, after awhile, a piece of the bark was loosened and broken off by a side stroke, the surface of the trunk appeared as if closely grooved by a carpenter using a gouge. In this manner the Pileated Woodpecker often, in that country, strips the entire trunks of the largest trees. On the contrary, when it attacked any other sort of timber, it pelted at the bark in a straightforward manner, detaching a large piece by a few strokes, and leaving the trunks smooth, no injury having been inflicted upon it by the bill.

We did not have the opportunity today for such extended observation of its working habits. Anyone who has ever encountered a dead tree which a Pileated has dug into in search of lunch cannot help but be impressed with the power of the bird's ability to perform major excavations!

Another of my favorite bird writers, Edward Howe Forbush, also describes the Pileated's ability to wreak havoc on tree bark:

Pileated Woodpeckers are such powerful birds that they can split off large slabs from decaying stumps, strip bushels of bark from dead trees, and chisel out large holes in either sound, dead, or decaying wood. They like to strip the bark from dead pines, spruces, and especially hemlocks. Their size and strength and their long spear-like tongues enable them to penetrate large trees and draw out borers from the very heart of the tree.

Nearly as striking as the bird's power is its voice; its raucous call is said to have been the inspiration for the laugh of Woody Woodpecker in the cartoons, though I find any resemblance between the two to be comparable to that of the imitation fruit flavors of candy to the real thing. I well recall when as a teenager, walking in the woods on the Massachusetts farm on which I grew up, hearing a wild call that sounded for all the world to me like a monkey in the zoo! I gradually worked my way towards the sound, sometimes following it when whatever was making it moved about, and was eventually rewarded with a good look at its source: a large, beautiful Pileated Woodpecker! This experience served to forever imprint the sound on my brain.