luck of the draw

Nothing too exciting to report this week. I only found owls at two sites. The first owl we found was “high and hooty.” He is actually notorious for this.
We found a pair of owls later in the week that were “good birds.” One of my coworkers fell on a steep slope and looked up and saw a female spotted owl staring at him. He was further down the slope than we were; so we scrambled down to catch up to him. The male owl came in a little later. I volunteered to go out on Friday (my day off) with my boss to catch a couple owls to attach radio backpacks on them. No luck, though. We didn’t even hear them. :( Oh well. I had to try. The pic above is of the male owl we saw. You can even see some of his band on his leg.

Communication with the outside world

Finally! An update!

It’s been a really busy last few weeks. I haven’t been able to check my email for quite a while least of all do a blog update. I was lucky enough to “convince” my coworker that he needed to go to Placerville and do some emailing at the cafe here.

I do have an awesome pic for everybody. I hope you like it, ‘cause I had to snowshoe two miles out, up a ridge and chase the owls around for a bit before heading back on snowshoes for another two miles to the truck.

Everybody has been bugging me for a pic of this snow I’ve been going though, so I took one a while ago. The snow had gone down quite a bit by the time I took this and now (luckily) it’s been hot enough for the past few weeks that there isn’t that much snow anymore. It just didn’t help then.

My fav week so far though was just this past week. Well... ... minus falling on my butt and impaling myself on a broken branch. Everyone go head and laugh, my butt got punctured by a broken branch! :) No worries though, it’s a nice sore scab now. Anyone have a hemorrhoid pillow??!! :) :) Anyway, we still have 20 some backpack transmitters to put on our birds and someone is coming out this week to help us put some one. They decided that our group (telemetry) better get some experience handling these birds before we have to put the backpacks on. Thank God for Hawk Ridge. I'm completely comfortable handling these birds. Sheila (our telemetry boss) caught this bird with a noose pole and I grabbed her when she was on the ground, put her in the handy “ice cream cone” grip and Sheila banded her. Sheila gave me a run down of how we’re gonna put the backpacks on and we went through the motions. Then I handed the owl to Jeff so he can get a feel for handling her. I took a couple pics.

Once we released her, she flew to the nearest branch and looked back at us. She gave us the nastiest glare. Ya wouldn’t think an owl could glare, but I swear she did. Then she flew to find her mate that had been hanging around the area while we banded her. Probably no sympathies from him however, he already went through this.

Hopefully next week will be another awesome week with a lot more of banding and radioing. We’ll see. ‘Til then keep in touch! Write a comment!