Owl Banding

So this isn't something normal, but it was very special. One of the second years is also working closely with banding at a bird observatory in Duluth, and he was showing off way too many adorable pictures with saw-whet owls which are way too precious. So we started begging to get in on this...and finally I got to observe for a couple hours on Tuesday night. These guys usually band all night every night for owls but we were only there for a bit since we still had to drive the 1.5 hours back and work the next day. 

So first picture is removing an owl from the net. These nets are very fine and hard to see so the bird will fly in and kind of get folded over in it. It's the same kind of net we use at Wolf Ridge for banding, but meant for bigger birds. 

Once the saw-whets are removed from the net they get stuffed in pvc pipes....they call it a six pack of saw-whets. Then they just hand out in their little pipe till it's time to be banded back at the blind. 

Back inside the blind the saw-whets are banded on their leg. Measurements are taken of the wing chord and weight. Then the tricky part is aging them based on molting patterns. They did this by looking at the primary and secondary flight feathers to see which were old and which new and it was so hard to tell the difference for my untrained eyes.  But I love how this guy is looking down his wing so perfectly posed.

And this wold be an owl ear....and that white round thing, yah that's the back of it's eye. 

I was mostly just observing, but they did allow us to hold them and then release them. We'd set them on our hand and they tended to hang out for a second like this guy, then take off when he was ready....

But they would land in a nearby tree for a few minutes to recoup and probably debrief on what the heck just happened to them. 

An even more special part of the night was catching a long eared owl which I'm hold there....you can see how happy she is about the situation. This lady was going for one of the saw-whets in the net when she got caught (the saw-whet was just fine). This is how we held all the owls, by their legs. She was a little annoyed and kept trying to pull free hence the angel wing look, but this is normal and doesn't hurt them. 

It was a determined it was a she because of the general buffiness...yah I'm not sure what that means either. Look at the stare though. They're named long eared because the feather tufts on top of the head are long...not actually the ear though if you remember the earlier picture :)

And then I got even more lucky, because I got to release her. I sort of gave her a couple bounces so she knew it was coming, the gave her a little 'toss' back into the air. She wasn't too fond of me, but I liked her.