Speaking of urban owls, this Barred Owl spent about 25 minutes peering
into my backyard koi pond at 5:30PM last Sunday.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFlSkh3Pd20

We regularly get Great Horned, Barred and Eastern Screech owls as "yard" birds.

Cheers,
Bill Hull
Cincinnati, OH, USA
http://www.mangoverde.com/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mangoverde/
http://www.youtube.com/user/mangoverde2



On Wed, Feb 23, 2011 at 10:29 AM, Bill Whan <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>       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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______________________________________________________________________

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