Following Urban Owls in Silver Spring: The Sligo Naturalist

I thought the dog had a serious nose whistle. Know what I mean by that? Like, when someone breathes in and out in their sleep and it makes a little breezy whistling noise? Not a full snore, mind you, kind of a teeny, tiny snore. A nose whistle.

But how, how was she able to make that noise??? I couldn’t figure it out. I was awake in bed with terrible insomnia, and she was in her little cozy dog bed. Was her nose against something hard, like the wall? It was such an ODD nose whistle.

There it was again.

But wait!! That wasn’t her. She was awake in the dark wagging her tail, wondering why I was staring at her. Suddenly, so was my very groggy husband whom I had accidentally awakened.

“Do you hear it?” I asked him. We both listened. Toot toot tooooo… Toot toot toooo…

“Uh, yeah, I think it’s an owl. Go back to sleep,” he said with exasperation.

The thing was, I wasn’t expecting to hear an owl out our window. We live awfully close to several urban arteries, and very close to the busiest section of the capital beltway. This ain’t Walton’s Mountain.

Whoo who whoooo…. it went again. Whoo cooks for you….

I was dying to get out of bed, but that would have been too disruptive and my poor husband had just gotten back to sleep. Could that REALLY be an owl in my yard? Gosh I was just dying to know. Now I really would never sleep. This was far too exciting.

I should not have been surprised. Several different neighbors have reported seeing owls in the last two years. One emailed videos of a large bird that did, indeed, seem to be a barred owl, splashing around in her bird bath. Another friend woke up one morning thinking she was hearing a domestic dispute in the empty house next door and instead found two owls sending jolly messages across the two sides of her back deck. She was unsure of what species but said they were pretty big. And just upstream, at the headwaters of the Sligo, people see and hear owls all the time.

Even so, I still mostly associate owl calls with camping in the mountains. For one thing, almost all of the local owl species like to nest in the hollowed out parts of old, dead trees. There just aren’t a lot of those in the close-in suburbs Montgomery County. For another thing, these birds are known to do best in large tracts of forest, which really is not a sentence any planner would use to describe Silver Spring these days.

But somehow the owls, like many other birds of prey, are adapting and continue to be out there among us. In fact, according to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, most barred owl populations seem to be increasing, placing them in the category of species which are of the “least concern.” And the birds seem to be living pretty happily in certain urban areas.

So maybe the only reason I don’t hear them so often is because I don’t really camp in my own back yard.

Last winter I became particularly fascinated by these tenacious birds, and I decided to go on one of Brookside Nature Center’s Owl Walks in December. About four other people came along, including one couple that seemed to be on a first date. (How cool is that?) We all bundled up and headed out into the dark with a naturalist who had some recorded owl calls in hand.

We hiked with flashlights in the lighted snowy woods, and tried not to giggle too much. It was kind of exhilarating, and I kept thinking of those goofy shows where people try to find Bigfoot in the Pacific Northwest. Anyhow, once we got deep enough into the woods we turned off the lights and played the recordings of screech owls. Sure enough, a real owl in the distance answered. Eventually, the real owl even came closer, flying just about eighteen inches over our heads in the dark. We were able to spot its silhouette in the trees and caught a glance of it with a flashlight. It blinked, then quickly flew off.

Eastern Screech Owls have long been common in urban habitats and like the barred owls are considered a species of “least concern.” They are tiny – measuring in at anywhere between six and nine inches tall -- but tough. They can eat songbirds that are their equal in size and weight.

Their calls sound so much like a scream that it is easy to see how they got their name. I am sure anyone hearing that sound along a busy part of our watershed would certainly think they were hearing something quite frightful and human.

But they also make a really cool sound which isn’t scary at all. Its almost like a coo, trilled over and over. It is sometimes referred to as the Bounce Song. The screech owls, which are known pair up for life, use this song to call to their potential mates across the woods.

Like other owls they also have HUGE ears which are really just holes hidden deep under soft feathers at the sides of their heads. The holes are surprisingly unsymmetrical, which enables the owls to be excellent hunters.

The only thing that beats seeing and hearing an owl call in person is dissecting an owl pellet. If you want a really cool way to learn about owls at home, you can order these one online. The pellets (which arrive after being sanitized in a autoclave) are not poop; rather, they are the little tufted balls of the leftover stuff that the bird is not able to digest when it gulps down its prey. Fur, feathers, bones, teeth… these can all be found in the mix. It is possible to play forensic scientist and ID what the owl ate for dinner. There are loads of charts online that will help you figure it all out.

Really experienced birders also say you can find owl roosts by looking in the woods for these pellets on the ground near hollow trees. I’ve even met a few bird watchers who claim that they can tell you immediately what species of bird left what kind of pellet.

I’ll keep looking, although I doubt I could do that kind of expert ID at this point. I have learned, however, to hear the difference between a dog’s nose whistle and a barred owl, which will come in handy someday if I decide to go camping in my own backyard with the dog.

(This article was originally published in the Voice newspapers of Takoma Park, Silver Spring and Kensington in November 2010.)