Saturday April 15th, 2006

I am finally at a wi-fi spot. I just posted a blog entry I made earlier in the week. I moved into our new “home” yesterday. I REALLY miss the other place!!! The new place is quite run down and not cozy at all. BUT, I will have limited and very slow internet access however. I guess it’s a trade off. I’ll try to get pics of the place later.

I have new pics of another owl. We had to shimmy over a fallen log that was “bridging” the ravine to a creek completely covered in bramble (blackberry bushes) to get to this bird, but she posed well for us! :)

This other location we’ve gone to so far has NOT been so nice. We went to this location earlier in the week and got skunked. We trudged around in the snow for a quite a while looking for a pair of birds that should be nesting in the area. We found one nest tree they’ve used before, but couldn’t for the life of us find the other nest tree. We ended our survey after a while and headed back.
Two days later we went back out to that site to try once more to find the birds/nest tree. We found our old snow tracks, hooted a lot and still no sign of the birds or nest tree. We decided to head in the opposite direction of the way we went before to survey for the owls. We got back up on the snow packed road and walked on it for a while. We FINALLY heard a male owl call that came from the area we were already at! We booked it down there looking for the owl. That’s when we just happened to walk by our nest tree that was marked. A little while later we found the male owl and ended up chasing him (or attempting to) around the forest a little to see if he was nesting yet. Need I tell you how hard it is to follow a bird at night in the snow? Needless to say, it didn’t work well. I fell in hip/waist deep SO many times!! We will have to go back out there later to see if he’s nesting. This bird kicked my butt!! I hope we don’t go back ‘til the snow is gone, but there’s so much I’m starting to think it will NEVER be gone.