I watched the owl leave tonight. 6:25 p.m. Each evening a little later as the sun sinks behind the horizon. If I were outside, I would absorb the silence of the day’s shadows. It is almost the end of January. Soon his mate will arrive. We hope. He has not left the box since he arrived. The day he is not there will be a sign.
Sunday morning it was 20º at 9:00 a.m. Overnight the neighborhood transformed into a gray, frozen world: bird baths frozen solid, the backyard silent; not even a wren hopping around the patio.
The male screech owl is still in the box. He has not left once since he arrived. When was that? October 28. He leaves the box around 5:40-5:45 p.m., a little later as the days begin to lengthen.
It began on October 26, 2023, when the male screech owl first appeared in the owl box and stayed each day, leaving just as evening shadows hid his nightly flight. On Thanksgiving Day, there was a surprise in the owl box – two screech owls - something we have never seen before.
Maybe it was just curious, just checking the box out for future use. As I watched hummingbirds chase each other from the feeder, a small brown head popped out of the owl box entrance. A squirrel.
The screech owls did not nest in the owl box this year. The male showed up, as we hoped, in October and guarded the box faithfully, only leaving for a day or two. When the female arrived in February, she stayed only than a week. And then they were gone. A second year without a successful nesting. But the owls have returned.
Elk grazed in the meadows just outside the north entrance as we drove along the road toward Silver Gate. We stopped first to check the great horned owls’ nest in Mammoth and spotted one adult deep in the branches and twigs staring straight at us. We stopped at Slough Creek also to check the Junction Butte den site. This spring the Junction Butte wolves have denned in their old site on the north side of the road.
The owl huddles in the corner of the box. He perches in the entrance in late afternoon or the middle of the day if it’s warm. The past few days he has left the box at somewhere between 6:30 and 6:45 p.m.; shooting out of the box and swooping down, he flies over the fence toward the greenbelt. A couple of days passed when he wasn’t in the box, but they were only isolated episodes.
A cold, wet spring day. Driving I-90 toward Yellowstone we pass pastures greening up with new grass and mountains dusted with snow. Elk fill the valleys - there are so many of them! Gray clouds cover the sky with intermittent rain showers breaking through, but the elk and horses and sheep are not disturbed from their grazing. It’s been a few years since we visited the Park in May and it’s good to be back when it’s cold; the wildlife is out and there aren’t so many people. It just feels wilder.
We encountered a new problem this month. We turned the camera in the owl box on only to discover it wasn’t working! Tim investigated every possible cause for the issue, but in the end the only solution was to install a new camera. Now. At the most inopportune moment in the nesting season.
