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with Phyllis Yochem
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Tuesday, April 25, 2000
Other birds protest strongly to screech-owl's visit
Recent rare drop-in by nocturnal raptor may be first sighting ever at Blucher Park
As I arrived at Blucher Park for a Spring Bird Walk the first week of April, I started down the gently winding path behind the historical sign. I greeted a man I did not recognize, standing a short way inside the path, and he told me he had just seen a screech owl.
"No," I said, to my shame, "We don't get them here."
He insisted that was what he had seen. About then a bird flew in front of us that I promptly identified as a Chuck-Will's widow.
"But there was a screech owl," he said. "I saw its face."
I continued to play the role of Doubting Thomas until, a few minutes later, other birders standing near said they, too, had seen a screech owl, but it had flown away.
A loud complaining began behind us in a tree to one side of the path. A mockingbird was obviously aroused and angry. We climbed to where we could see into the tree. A brown thrasher had joined the mockingbird, and a cardinal.
All were protesting, and loudly haranguing the little gray creature peering down through the leaves, "mobbing it," as they say in crow country.
In a few more minutes, the owl flew out and across the street, to be sighted no more. The other birds, hushed, went back to their business. The matter had been settled satisfactorily. Obviously they considered the owl an intruder.
A first at Blucher
I looked for the man I had so summarily advised that the owl was not there. I intended to apologize. But I couldn't find him or recognize him. I hope he reads this and accepts my admission of error. Of course he had seen an eastern screech owl.
As far as I know, however, he had seen the first eastern screech owl ever sighted in Blucher Park. When Jimmy Swartz, who has been birding Blucher as long as I have, arrived, he too did not remember that one had ever been seen there before.
Eastern screech owls are small birds with large heads, short necks and prominent ear tufts. The form found in Texas is gray, finely barred and streaked, with white below. Its large, yellow, close-set eyes are forward directed and enclosed in black-rimmed facial disks.
When they fly, their wings are broad with rounded ends and feathered edges that make their movements almost noiseless.
A fly-by-night bird
These nocturnal birds spend their days in the seclusion of dense foliage or in a tree cavity. Our Blucher bird was first discovered in a hole in the stump of an old hackberry tree, where he was photographed by David Chenvert. The sound of the eastern screech owl's call is familiar to most birders who have heard a taped version of it played to attract small birds from cover and out into view.
A family of the little owls nested near the Oso in a secluded neighborhood in Flour Bluff one year. When the adult owls went to forage in the evening, the young owls would sit around looking down from the branches of the tree that was their home.
Spring Bird Walks at Blucher Park continue Saturday and Sunday mornings, from daylight on. This could be a good weekend.
Phyllis Yochem, a Corpus Christi
resident, has studied birds of Texas since 1960.
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