Dave as usual showed excellent birding instincts here, and the rest of
us ought to emulate. Both crows and raptors, including owls, have been
increasing in numbers in urban settings in recent decades. Winters are
warmer in the city. Shooting is forbidden. Food is easier to
find--everything from dumpster treasures, to feeders crowded with
smaller birds, to little Fluffy abroad at night. Tree stands are
maturing, and big old trees with cavities are more often allowed to
stand these days.
        Crows are a lot better at finding owls than we are, and they do a noisy
job of it, worth paying attention to. Here in Clintonville it's not too
hard to find screech-owls, great horned owls, and barred owls just by
listening at night this time of year, especially if you crack a bedroom
window. Long-eareds and saw-whets are much less often detected. There
are small numbers of nesting records of saw-whets in the city; in their
much more likely role as migrants these small owls are fond of thick
cover, tough to flush, and crows don't mind them as much, but we
occasionally come across them in Clintonville.
        Long-eareds are even more of a mystery; they nested here when
open-country hunting grounds were available. We have records of snowy
and short-eared owls only from decades ago when we had more fields. Our
eighth species, the barn owl, has many old records here, but none in
recent decades, having suffered as well from habitat loss; in the old
days, it nested in hollow sycamores along the Olentangy with nearby
meadows, but no more.
        Anyway, city-dwellers in older tree-dominated neighborhoods might be
surprised how many owls share the habitat with us...especially if we
don't press them too hard.
Bill Whan
Columbus

p.s. Check out Bernd Heinrich's new book (Harvard Univ Press 2010), "The
Nesting Season: Cuckoos, Cuckolds, and the Invention of Monogamy"!





On 2/23/2011 8:00 AM, Dave Horn wrote:
> Hello Ohio Birders,
>
> Timing is everything.  While taking the trash to the curb this
> morning (7:15am) I was distracted by 50-60 crows mobbing my
> neighbor's spruce tree.  After about 5 minutes an owl flew out and
> headed southward.  I did not have a decent look at the usual field
> marks but it had the slim, long-winged look of a long-eared rather
> than the chubby barred owl silhouette, and it was too small for a
> great horned. (Barred and great horned both occur in the
> neighborhood.)
>
> I live on Arden Rd. in the first block east of High St. in the
> Clintonville area.  The bird flew in the direction of East North
> Broadway on a straight course, with a few crows in pursuit.
>
> I'll keep an eye on my neighbor's tree, and other Clintonville
> birders might be on the lookout.
>
> Happy birding,
>
> Dave Horn Columbus
>
>

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