Great Horned Owls and Crows

Great horned owls will eat little great horned owls (owlets).
They will eat darned near anything that they can, really.

Personally, I'm a raptor fan.

 

A fighter pilot taken aback by geek factor?! What the heck's
wrong with him? He oughta love the idea, he'd certainly be
used to various control-by-wire scenarios.
.
_H*

 

A stuffed owl is a traditional decoy for crow hunting. You wire the owl into a tree, pull up a chair, and sit there with your 410; the crows will come.

Tom

 

Why? Do the crow homies gang up to beat the snot out of the owl?

 

When the raptors migrate south over the Grand Canyon, they all come across at Yavapai Point because it's the narrowest part. The HawkWatch people put owl decoys in the trees to suck in the Hawks (next predator up the scale), for easier IDing and to look for leg bands.

HawkWatch also gives lectures to tourists and rookie ornithologists like myself. Lotsa fun. I was there with a parabolic microphone trying to record the weird babblings that Ravens do at the GC.

As far as I can tell, ravens talk with more variety there, because they think they are in heaven. Perhaps they're right. Also the south rim is now a great place to see (implanted) condors.

I drove there in a Prius, does that count for anything?

 

I have vivid memories of watching ravens "surf" the updrafts off of the North Rim. Eight or ten birds - like skate boarders on a half pipe - just looping and falling for the joy of it! Now that I have my Prius, I can afford to drive there again. WHAT a place to see condors!!!

 

In Summer, I can watch street gangs of crows harassing lone eagles. The eagle never appears in any distress, and usually out-climbs the crows within a few minutes. So if an owl wants to...uh...eat crow, I think that's fine.

 

We have hawks and bald eagles up here, and of course owls. One of the previous posters mentioned hawk migration. We live out on the end of a 30 mile finger of land sticking into Lake Michigan (people in Michigan call it Michigan's little finger). One of the interesting things about our geography is that birds use it as a jumping off point for crossing the Lake. Hawks in particular congregate in large numbers. Last fall I saw a kettle of 25 circling around. I would hate to be a small animal in the middle of that group. Come to think of it, I would hate to be a small animal under any circumstances, unless I were a house cat. They have it way too easy.

Another story about birds and the Lake. We were sailing up to Beaver Island, which takes us about eight or nine hours. It was a gray, ugly sort of day with low clouds and poor visibility. Half way into the trip, a pigeon flew in from the Wisconsin side and started circling our boat, then lined up on the bow and tried to land. He obviously wasn't a Navy pigeon because he made a pretty crappy landing, bouncing off the jib and sliding on the deck. It took him a few minutes to get his sea legs, during which period he staggered back and forth with each passing wave. Eventually he settled down and took a half-hour rest. After that, he took off and resumed his trip towards Michigan. It was pretty cool.

We have a lot of wild turkeys too. They are not the best fliers, but they do fly and they roost in trees, which seems very unlikely given their bulk and lack of grace. Last night my wife an I went snow shoeing into the woods and swamp at the end of our street (Nagonaba St. - we live on the corner of Nagonaba and Shabwasung, but that's another story). It's only 200 yards over a hill to the end of the street. As we headed down the hill we noticed turkeys on the ground, which isn't unusual, but it's always fun. They were moving up from the ground to roost in the trees. The trees were already full of big, fat birds, with the little branches bending back and forth looking like they would break. As we got closer they started to fly off. What a lot of fuss. I don't know what keeps them from breaking wings when they fly through the trees. It's not like owls, where they glide smoothly between the branches. Turkeys sound like a plastic bag stuck on your car antenna. It's a huge fuss when a whole rafter of them take off.

Then there are the swans...

Tom

 

I'll throw in a submarine bird story. We are in the far north oceans. We are trying to be stealthy. For receiving messages we deploy a long cable that is a floating antenna. SO.......

If you ever see a long line of seagulls travelling sideways across the ocean at three knots....

 

Oh my, that's good! You have to be careful with those trailing devices, but I never though about birds. I knew a skipper who backed down over his own hydrophone array and cut it loose. Not a good thing to do. I wonder if they took it out of his paycheck?

Tom

 

I forgot to ask, what were you on? It sounds like a boomer, floating around up there in the cold north.

Tom

 

Go to Airwarriors.com and peruse some of the threads. Most of the fighter pilots have F/A-18 avatars and gold wings below their avatar; if you read through their posts, you'll get an idea of what they're like.

 

Well, back then you probably didn't want Bears or Ka-25's see it anyways...

Tom, could have been an attack boat sitting behind SOSUS? So FL, which was it? You gotta at least tell us the class if you won't say which boat.