I don't think anyone would argue that this has been an extraordinary winter
for Barn Owls. All the evidence we need are the large number of Barn Owls
hanging out in Hell's Gate State Park, Chief Joseph State Park and the Nez
Perce national monument and the unbelievable high number for the Moscow side
of the Moscow/Pullman CBC (28). I am about to add another bit of evidence.

I was driving a lonely, country road in southeastern Washington on Sunday
morning. I don't remember the number; it is the road that connects U.S. 12
(between Walla Walla and Lewiston) to Washington 26 (Colfax to Vantage).
The route was approximately 30 miles long. The weather was steady, hard
rain and it was dark; the clouds were much too thick to allow light from the
full moon to hit the ground. It was 0500 PST which is either very early or
very late, depending on your perspective. From my perspective it was very
late because we had been driving since 2100 PST Saturday night and had been
'going' since 0630 PST Saturday. The story of how I ended up on this long,
nightmarish trip is not suitable for this list because there isn't a bird in
the single tale. It would be more suitable to a discussion group on why men
can't say no to their mothers. But I digress.

The first Barn Owl was spotted on U.S. 12 just west of the junction with the
road I described. I was jolted awake from a fitful sleep by the car
stopping. My significant other pointed out the side window and there was
the first ghost, perched on a fence post, less than twenty feet from the
car, illuminated by the light along the side of the car. We looked at it
several times using my awesome light-gathering optics in my 10x50 Pentax
bins. It was a beautiful owl and just sat there, in the rain, while we
looked at it. Even as we left, it stayed on fence post. We spotted one
more owl in flight, just before the intersection with the road to Colfax.
Then my significant other decided his eyes couldn't stay open any longer and
I took over the driving. In the next 25 miles, I spotted THIRTEEN barn
owls. Three were brief glimpse of a "ghost" as it flew along the side of
the road. Three were blobs on the top of fence posts just outside of the
range of the headlight that were the right shape and size for a Barn Owl
(but a foreign object placed on the post couldn't be positively ruled out.
The other seven were owls perched on fence posts or reflectors close to the
road, their full faces visible to me. The distribution of the owls seemed
to be clumped. There would be three very close together and then several
miles before the next owl. These ghostly birds were great for keeping me
awake on this lonely stretch of road. And I mean lonely. I didn't see a
car the whole stretch of road and there were only a few houses.

Interestingly, we had driven this same stretch of road in the dark just two
weeks ago, but earlier in the night (around midnight) and we had seen three
ghostly visions we thought were Barn Owls flying over the car but we
couldn't be sure of the species. On both trips, we did not see any owls
along the stretch of WA 26 between the junction and Colfax and only a few on
U.S. 12. Two weeks ago, we saw a large number of small mammals, probably
voles, crossing the road. Sunday morning I didn't see a single small mammal
on the road. We did not see any owls on the hundreds of miles we drove in
northeastern Oregon and southeastern Washington in the hours before these
sightings.

James also saw several ghostly visions he thought were owls before the one
he stopped so I could wake up and to look at it.

I think an average of a Barn Owl per two miles of road is a pretty
impressive number! What a year! What a night!!!!!

Cheers
Deb

Deb Beutler
Dept. of Zoology
Washington State University
Pullman, Whitman Co., WA

dbeutler at wsunix.wsu.edu