Warblers are great little birds. Birders love them because they are lively and colorful and come in nearly endless variety. But they're a bit of an acquired taste as well - they're lively (i.e., hard to focus on as they bounce around the treetops), colorful (except in fall and winter, when they aren't) and come in nearly endless variety (nearly fifty species' plumages to learn... in male, female, juvenile and non-breeding variations). If you point out an adult male Yellow Warbler or Redstart to a non-birder, most will respond with an ooh or ahh of appreciation. But if you pointed out a Kirtland's warbler anywhere outside northern Michigan, the complete amazingness of the sighting would be lost on most normal citizens. Them's the breaks...
Some birds have more universal appeal. Hummingbirds... colorful, zippy little birds who spend their days hanging around flowers. Shorebirds... most people don't really know one from another, but they're the birds who like to hang out on beaches where we relax, so a lot of driftwood carvings of them get sold. And speaking of birds with merchandising muscle... how about those Bald Eagles?
But the birds who seem to fascinate humans more than any other are the owls.
Owls have been on my mind a bit more than usual lately. I've gone out owling with a friend a few evenings recently, which resulted in some interesting sightings. And this week, I woke one morning around 4:30 to hear a Great-horned Owl hooting across the street - the first time that's happened in the eight years we've lived here.
I wrote the first part of this earlier on Saturday, and have just now come back from another night of urban owling. I think I mentioned a few weeks back that my friend Walter had been noticing a lot of pellets around the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, so we went looking for owls one night in April. He'd seen Great-horned Owls there on occasion, so we were excited at the prospect that one was hanging out. Much to our surprise, those were Barn Owl pellets.
The Palace of Fine Arts is an amazing space, a glorious place to walk through anytime day or night. Right now, a night time stroll is even more interesting than usual. (It's not just the owls, either - there are bats soaring high in the dome, and night herons out over the water.)
Oh, that owl!
And it wasn't just one owl - we saw two of them while we walked around that night, and he found a third after I left (sharing a perch with the second owl). Days later, he heard a begging youngster as well. This was the first recorded breeding in San Francisco since 1915. That's what had us out there again tonight.
Though I didn't get any good photos (but there's a link to some great ones at the end), I did take a few short videos, in which you can hear the baby barn owl calling at the top of the columns.
An easier-to-see Barn Owl, just because.
Owls occupy an interesting niche for humans. We normally label animals as good or bad, killers or cuddlers. Chickadees are cute birds, hawks are predators. Owls are treated as a bit of both. They're harbingers of doom, spooky creatures from the deep woods in the dark night. But they're wide-eyed personifications of wisdom as well, fluffy round birds looking down in bemusement. They're hard to know, so we just haven't made up our minds about them, apparently.
Can something this small and cute really be a killer?
All I know is that I'm always willing to go a bit out of my way to see an owl. Maybe it means taking a twilight hike into Tennessee Valley; maybe it's staying out late to wait for them to emerge from the shadows at the Palace. It means paying a few dollars to visit Mercey Hot Springs, or stopping to look at every field with ground squirrels in quest of Burrowing Owls.
One of the famous $5 owls of Mercey Hot Springs.
As is so often the case, if you'd like to see better fantastic pictures of the owls at the Palace of Fine Arts or Tennessee Valley, visit birdlightwind.