Tough little birds…

Young Northern Saw-whets

I always stop to listen to the night sounds when I take the dogs out at night. I could just let them out the door and go back to my warm bed for the few moments they stay out, but with the wolves lurking almost nightly around our house, I don’t dare. So I go out and listen. I have recently heard our resident barred owl hooting down in the black spruce. I will have to go check our barred owl nesting box to see if she has set up residence in it. But have to wait til there is a decent crust on the snow to hold me up as the spongy moss under snow makes walking awkward.

But the owls I really love to hear are the tiny little Northern Saw-whets and Boreal owls. Some describe the call of the Saw-whet as that of a saw being sharpened but to make a more modern description, I think they sound like heavy equipment back up bells. The doot doot doot that goes on and on can stick in ones head like a music worm. When I participated in owl surveys, I would get home in the wee hours to try to catch some sleep. But the repetitive sound of the little owls would stick in my head and keep me awake.

The call of the Boreal is also very unique for an owl call. Truth be told, many folks mistake it for the winnowing call of the Common Snipe that fill the spring air. If the call comes from on high, it is a snipe, if it comes from the same location each time in the trees, it is an owl. Also, the little Boreals are already staking out their territory in the dead of winter. While staying out at my mom’s camp last week, I would wake up to the call of a Boreal in the big poplars behind her house. Boreals and Saw-whets both use the cavities made by pileated woodpeckers as nesting cavities. This allows them to start nesting early and helps them avoid the corvids and jays that take great pleasure, it seems, in tormenting them.

So even though I have to leave my warm bed to ensure the safety of my dogs, the cold is tolerable once I hear my little owl harbingers, braving the winter and singing their song of love. Spring can’t be far off.

Bravest of the boreal birds…

gray jay collecting fruit and storing it away.

I have been watching the gray jays that hang around our property tugging and pulling at potential nest materials for the past few days. They were mostly intent on grasses, pieces of my grape vine and feathers floating around the eagle pens, hauling them somewhere across our pond. This morning, the deer fought over the chicken food I had tossed around for my pigeons, knocking out big clumps of hair as they struck each other. After they moved on, one of the jays raced around cramming the clumps of hair in his or her beak and flew off with its find. The young jays, once hatched, should be plenty warm.
The reason I deemed the jays to be the bravest is that they pick the dead of winter to raise up their young. Not only can the days and night be bitter, but available food is limited.
Their habit of storing food all winter long helps to ensure the young will have food, but food can be scarce in the forest. One of their high protein food sources that they rely on are the bloated winter ticks that fall from moose in March onto the snow. Jays will gather these and store them away, gluing them down with their sticky saliva until they are needed to feed the young. I remember one snowy February a co-worker and I were marking a wood harvesting block, following the tracks of a moose that would continually rub its back and sides on stumps and trees trying to rid itself of the annoying, itching ticks. The jays were following along the tracks, picking up the ticks that had fallen off or had been squished on the stump. I just wonder how many of the live ticks crawled off after the jay had stored it though, or if they knew to kill them first. And now since moose populations in many areas around here have crashed, what protein source replaces the ticks full of moose blood?
There is little information on nests of gray jays, indeed in all our years of trekking through all types of habitat, neither Bruce nor I have ever seen the ones described in bird and nest identification books. I have, though, on two occasions, seen them going in and out of pileated woodpecker holes in old rotten aspen chicots and once into an owl nest box set up on our property. I also saw evidence that they had used a mistletoe or twiggy growth in a balsam to raise young.
This year, since I am retired, I am going to make an effort to see where my birds nest. Maybe I will be able to add a record to Ontario Nesting Birds.