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 > > ______________________________________________________________________ Ohio-birds mailing list, a service of the Ohio Ornithological Society. Our thanks to Miami University for hosting this mailing list. Additional discussions can be found in our forums, at www.ohiobirds.org/forum/. You can join or leave the list, or change your options, at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/scripts/wa.exe?LIST=OHIO-BIRDS Send questions or comments about the list to: [log in to unmask]