Windows on Wildlife: Barred Owl Encounter

Welcome to the 17th edition of  Windows on Wildlife!  If you have a recent post about wildlife you’d like to share – it can be anything: birds, insects, mammals – scroll down to the end of the post and add your site; a compilation of all additions will be posted the following week. Please don’t forget to link back here (I’d love it if you’d add the Windows on Wildlife button to your post which you can find on our sidebar) and visit other blogs that have articles to share. Thanks for stopping by!

Note: photo above, very much NOT taken by me (see credits). Thorin and I are settling into a comfortable routine of walking in the woods behind our house for 45 minutes every day, occasionally more than once. I tend not to walk back there without a dog, just because I don’t know who owns the property and/or maintains the well-used trails.

I’ve known we had nesting Barred Owls back there for several years – I usually hear them once or twice in the late winter and early spring when they start their mating calls. But the other day I was fortunate enough to see one. It swooped silently through the hemlocks not far overhead, and my first assumption was that it was a Red-tailed hawk.  We seem to have them all over the place, and more often than not when I spy a raptor, if it’s not a Turkey Vulture it’s a Red-tailed.

The distinctively blunt head gave it away as an owl fairly quickly, and the brown and white coloring as a Barred. It landed in a Hemlock not far from us but up pretty high, and craned its head down to peer at us.  I attempted a photo, but it moved on before I could get it in sight. It called twice as we continued our walk, but I couldn’t catch sight of it again. This time of year – particularly around the Equinox – the shift in daylight  hours occasionally fools birds into their spring songs for a short while.

I’m looking forward to spending more time back there tracking this fall and winter, and starting to develop a sense of the wildlife that resides and moves through the various undeveloped tracts around our home.

Linking up with Nature Notes!

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Two weeks ago, Fergiemoto shared a beautiful macro shot of a ladybug/ladybird beetle, clasping a stem. Somewhere in the recesses of my memory I recall ladybugs being called ‘tomato beetles’. Anyone know if that’s another common name for this species?

 Share your wildlife encounters with us below in the link-up!