Joe, I don't know about the porcupine, but from looking at your
photos of owl remains, they look much more like what would be left by
a non-human predator than by a person, who very likely would either
have shot the owls and left them to lie there intact or would have
taken them away, feathers and all. I can't imagine a person leaving
what you saw there, or do you think the owls were shot and then eaten
by something else? All the shell casings would seem to point to that,
and I have no doubt there are plenty of people out there who would
commit such a crime. But I wonder if someone shot an owl there, if
that wouldn't flush all the others, even causing them to fly away
from the stand of trees out of harm's way. Perhaps if there was no
other place to go, they would keep returning, but I have a little
trouble imaging some yahoo spending that much time and energy to kill
them all. As an alternative, a quiet predator could get them one at a
time. A Great Horned Owl, for example, could clean out a roost of
Long-ears.

Dennis
---------------------
Date: Sat, 7 Oct 2006 06:53:19 -0700
From: "Joseph V Higbee" <jvhigbee at hotmail.com>
Subject: [Tweeters] Bad news at Long-eared Owl site
To: <tweeters at u.washington.edu>
Message-ID: <BAY117-DAV861C8A8C5E4973AE32F22D7100 at phx.gbl>
Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed; charset="iso-8859-1";
reply-type=original

Yesterday morning about 11 O'clock my wife and I stopped by a known
Long-eared Owl site near Mansfield. What we saw wasn't pretty. 12 Gauge
shotgun shells littered the complete site and 38mm casings were
numerous on
the road. As we investigated the site we found feathers in several
scattered
locations. A dead porcupine was also found. He wasn't at all
decomposed yet
and hadn't even started to smell noticeably beyond about 6 feet away.
Several other things make us believe this happened within the last
few days.
I have posted some pictures of the scene.

http://www.pbase.com/jvhigbee/current

Joseph V Higbee
Spanaway, WA
Mailto: jvhigbee at hotmail.com

-----
Dennis Paulson
1724 NE 98 St.
Seattle, WA 98115
206-528-1382
dennispaulson at comcast.net

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman1.u.washington.edu/pipermail/tweeters/attachments/20061007/9ee78e31/attachment.htm