Subject: [Tweeters] NSWO and Soos Creek
Date: Wed Nov 18 15:03:02 PST 2020
From: Tim Brennan - tsbrennan at hotmail.com

Hey Tweets!

I guess I had not quite anticipated the flood of emails about Northern Saw-whet Owls at Soos Creek. I thought I'd throw out some general statements before tackling individual emails.

1) I've never seen a Northern Saw-whet Owl on the Soos Creek Trail. And I know, some people right now are puzzled, "But you said. . . ". For clarification, when I go out for owls, I'll usually try for them in the wee hours. There may be some wisdom to dawn and dusk with some species - I really can't speak to that. I will call for them - most of the calls I'm able to imitate, but there are of course apps out there to help with this. If I whistle a saw-whet tune and get a saw-whet tune coming back to me from the distance. . . maybe I'm weird and less of a bird"watcher", but I'm pretty happy just knowing that they are there. Keep playing, play louder, bring out the spotlights and. . . sure, you can see them. It's just a level of effort and disturbance that doesn't hold a lot of interest for me.

Many of the emails had that theme - "I've heard them, but never seen them, and would love to." But after getting "I've heard them on Soos Creek, but never seen them - where's your spot?", I thought it was probably time to be extra clear on that.

2) I have seen a saw-whet once in my life - at a cemetery in winter in Yakima County. In Eastern Washington, owls can often be found day-roosting in some favored spots. For people that really want the visuals, this is a far better bet, and eBird (once it is back up) can provide some nice leads for places where you can poke around some sparse trees, and look for those day roosters.

3) The Soos Creek trail is, from end to end, a nice place for owls. I have had Barn, Barred, Great Horned, Northern Saw-whet, and (not in a number of years) Western Screech-Owls at different points along the trail. They used to run Owl Prowls there, which did involve flashlights and playback - some of this was mitigated by the fact that a dozen people or so could enjoy some owls with a single disturbance "event", I suppose. The increase of Barred Owls in the area, and other factors seem to have led to WESO's moving out, so I do want to be thoughtful about smaller owls in the area.

4) With the first 4... then 8... emails I got, I didn't really know what to do. Tell everyone individually where to go, and have them all hit the same spot at different times? Organize something where we could all pile into cars together and try for the owls? Lots of bad options, I guess. We shot some emails back and forth, and I vaguely suggested that if people wanted to try to at least coordinate between each other some times to investigate the area together, it would be a nice impact-reducing step.

5) Is this really the only place where any NSWO regularly sets up shop in the area? Or do people just not go out to try for owls all that often? When I hit other counties in the state, I will almost always do some focused owling. NSWO is one that has shown up in all five of the counties I've focused on in recent years (Mason, Chelan, Snohomish, Yakima, Lewis). This may be a piece of why I was surprised by the flood of emails!

Man, there might be points 6-10, but this is already a bit long! Apologies if I am slow in responding, and hopefully this will lead to some good general posts about owls, and NSWO in particular.

Cheers,

Tim
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