The Northern Saw-Whet Owl

Abigail Garofalo: 00:09

Welcome to another episode of Spotlight on Natural Resources where we shine some light on what's going on in your environment. I'm your host, Abigail Garofalo.

Amy Lefringhouse: 00:18

And I'm your cohost, Amy Lefringhouse.

Amy Lefringhouse: 00:20

Before we get started today, we wanted to talk a little bit about wildlife and how we should approach wildlife when we are in nature. And we here at Spotlight on Natural Resources podcast want our listeners to know that while you're in nature, make sure that when you see wildlife that you are appreciating them from a distance that's safe for both humans and for the birds and or the wildlife that you are viewing. We really love, you know, wildlife. We are learning about some really cool birds within this podcast, but we want our listeners to know that we should always appreciate our wildlife in nature from a safe distance. So let's get started today.

Abigail Garofalo: 01:09

Today, we are here with Mike Avera, the avian lab manager and field coordinator for University of Illinois Urbana Champaign here to chat with us about owls. Welcome, Mike.

Mike Avara: 01:20

Thank you.

Abigail Garofalo: 01:21

Well, we're excited to have you. This is kind of tied in with our everyday environment webinar series too. So as you all are listening, if you are coming and joining us from from the watching the webinar, then welcome. If you are listening to this and you're like, I wanna learn more about owls, then go check it out. It's gonna be on YouTube soon.

Abigail Garofalo: 01:40

So we're excited to chat and get real nerdy about birds and owls, and so let's get started. So I said I kinda clued into this already, but what types of birds do you study, Mike?

Mike Avara: 01:52

We study saw-whet owls, and sawwhet owls are the smallest owl in Illinois. They're unique in that they're migratory, so they breed all the way up in the Northern Great Lakes in Canada, and then they winter points all the way down, like, the deep deep South, like Georgia and and even Alabama. And so that brings Illinois into the equation. So they're kind of a part time resident in Illinois. So we'll see them come down their fall migration, and some will stay over the winter, and then they'll pass through Illinois on their way back north. So and the most interesting thing really about them is that many people don't even realize they passed through. They're just so small, they're so secretive, and they're here for such a short period of time. So really, really neat study species to study. They tend to hang out in, like, these really dense understories, so really thick early successional vegetation. So think like bush honeysuckle, autumn olive, red cedar, multiflora roses, grapevine, you know, all the really fun stuff to walk through when you're outside.

Abigail Garofalo: 03:04

All those species that we usually hear everyone's such a fan of too is what I'm hearing.

Mike Avara: 03:11

Although this time of year, I mean, you know, red cedars have their use for some people as Christmas trees, so there is that. Right?

Abigail Garofalo: 03:17

Mhmm. True.

Mike Avara: 03:18

But they're also used as kinda winter hangout spots for the saw-whet owls as they're just trying to hang out in what they would consider a warmer climate until they've moved further north to breed.

Abigail Garofalo: 03:31

And so they like that thicker habitat is what you're saying? Because, like, when you describe those, those to me are, like, often we don't like them because they create these thickets. Right? And so is that's kind of the habitat you're talking about, these sawwhets like.

Mike Avara: 03:44

Right. It it it forms a nice safe refuge for them in an in an owl eat owl kind of world. So, you know, they've they've gotta be able to just hang out undetected in an area, you know, over the winter, you know, just so that eventually they can, you know, head back north again. So it's just a a short stop over a period form.

Abigail Garofalo: 04:05

Alright. Wait. Hold on. And tell me more about this owl eat owl world that we're living in. What does that mean?

Mike Avara: 04:11

This is one of the more depressing things to talk about. So as exciting as it is to have saw-whet owls on the landscape, they are a prize to target for other owls. So barred owls, even screech owls, great horned owls, some of our owls who are yearlong residents in Illinois do prey out of the species. And so, unfortunately, they're they're a little bit of a risk when they come down here to spend the winter.

Amy Lefringhouse: 04:41

Now for our listeners, Mike, talk about the size. Are they since it is owl eat owl, talk about the size of these owls, then do they are they do they have any color variations when they're, I guess, traveling through our area?

Mike Avara: 04:57

Yeah. So when we're talking about a saw-whet owl, imagine an owl about the size of your fist. It's it's really a a small bird as opposed to, you know, screech owl might be twice that size or barred owl several times that size. In great horned, we're talking way bigger. So and when it comes to coloration, for the most part, they do the the young look very unique in that they're they're very, like, almost a uniform brown kind of rufous color. But as they grow into their adult plumage, there's a lot more variations, a lot more of, like, a brown streaking pattern, and I think that helps in a lot of ways with camouflage. I I can't tell you how many times I've actually tracked these owls to where the roost is, and I could be three or four feet from them and not even see them just because of the the streaking, making it look like, you know, brushes and brambles that they're actually sitting in.

Abigail Garofalo: 05:56

I was gonna say they've kind of had to evolve that way. Right? Like, they've had to find ways to be as discreet as possible, and and and maybe that's part of their size advantage too is, like, I'm small. I'm not seen.

Mike Avara: 06:10

Exactly. And when that's when that's your adaptation, it's really important that, you know, you stay still. That so oftentimes, you know, if if you approach an area where there's a roost, they're not going to flush until you basically almost touch them because they know as soon as they move, that puts them at risk for being detected by a predator. So Sure. From a conservation standpoint, if you ever do know of an area where there is a sawwhet out, it's really important not to draw attention to it, respect, you know, the the fact that it's just trying to survive and persist through the winter and and and not exactly to go out of your way to bother it.

Amy Lefringhouse: 06:48

And, again, the reason why they like those dense thickets where those larger larger owls can't get into those areas. So what what made you want to study these owls then?

Mike Avara: 07:01

Yeah. I mean, there's there's a lot of different reasons. I guess from from the very basic, you know, you think about owls in in kind of the public side, and You think about, you know, Harry Potter and how it really popularized owls. And, you know, owls are very charismatic. I think a lot of it has to do with just the fact that there's those two eyes, you know, facing forward in their in their head and, you know, reminds people of human faces. And and so, I mean, owls are definitely a charismatic species, and we've capitalized on this in that we've displayed our research at public outreach nights, owl nights that we call out at Allerton. But also on on a more scientific research level, we started studying them because there was relatively little known about their distribution in Illinois. I mean, there had been some reports of individuals who had been observed randomly, but, again, they're very secretive. I mean and and, again, they do that by necessity. Another thing when it comes to birdwatching, a lot of times birdwatchers use audio cues to determine if a bird is present or not. And because these birds make very few vocalizations, the story that I always like to tell is of and and maybe you're familiar with this. In 2020, they selected the tree for rocket the Christmas tree for Rockefeller Center. The it's like a 75 foot Norway spruce, from Upstate New York, and and they brought it, you know, 170 miles down to New York City. It took, like, three days, and they're unwrapping the tree. And lo and behold, there's a saw-whet owl in the middle of it. They nicknamed nicknamed her Rocky, and, of course, she hadn't eaten or had anything to to drink in in days, so they, you know, they admitted her into the into the nearest wildlife clinic. But, I mean, that just goes to show how how little we realized they're there in plain sight. It's it's just you really have to be looking for them.

Abigail Garofalo: 09:01

I remember that story. Like, you just kinda tickled the edge of my brain, like, being like, oh, yeah. Like, I remember hearing about an owl, but, like, that's so cool that, like this is why I find ecology so cool because, like, it's that whole story of, like, yeah. And it's because of, like, their relationship with predation and and all of that that, like, why that culminated in this event of, like, us not seeing them in this accidental wildlife interaction and stuff. And so that's that's so cool and also poor Rocky. So

Mike Avara: 09:30

Exactly.

Amy Lefringhouse: 09:32

I think that even with touching sorry just to add on to that, but even with, you know, educating younger chill kids and students that things are happening in the wild that we can't see all the time, and it's not a storybook, you know, thing where you're gonna go out there and you're gonna sit and you're gonna see all the happenings of nature. It's it's happening whether we're there, whether we're not there, whether we see it, whether we don't see it. Those the concepts that we study in the class, you know, predation and, you know, all of the things is it's it's happening. And I think sometimes it's hard to, like, to grasp that we want it to happen when we want it to happen. Right? We wanna see those, you know, that phenomena whenever we wanna see it. So it just I don't know. Just being reflective, I guess, on on some of the concepts that that we study and then, you know, it's really happening out there.

Abigail Garofalo: 10:29

Definitely true, Amy. I love that. I love please always get on that soapbox. I love it. Keep it going. I was gonna ask too, though. So they're so difficult to find. They're so secretive. They don't really make much noise. How do you know that they're there? Like, how do you what are some, you know, indicators that a sawwhet owl might be near?

Mike Avara: 10:48

Right. So, I mean, individuals can go out on the landscape and they can search, but as you can probably imagine, it's a pretty painstaking search. Again, I mean, if you target habitats like that during, you know, mid October to, the late late November, you know, you are more likely to encounter them. But the reality is we didn't even know how prevalent they were on the landscape until we actually started banding operations. And during banding operations, we're actually using a lure to actually call them into our nets. So and then once we've done that, we're putting a transmitter on the bird. So, you know, then we can go back and try to relocate and and hand track where the bird actually is. So so we cheat a little bit. We've got a few tools at our disposal that aren't at the general public's disposal.

Abigail Garofalo: 11:37

But I just love that it's like I'm it's so evolutionarily good at its job. It's so adaptive that even like, we're like, nope. But we gotta we gotta reach into the depths of our technology. And it makes me happy because I feel like you hear about some animals that, like, aren't very good at things sometimes. Like, you're like, like remember that? I don't know if you all saw, like, on the Internet a while back. It was like a a teeny tiny frog that was so small, it never landed well on its feet based on its size adaptation or something. And I was like, oh, man. Like, a frog that can't jump, that's just sad. Like, so to have an owl that's small and really good at what it's meant to do, I makes me happy. So. Well, when it comes to researching these owls, what are you trying to discover or find out when it comes to understanding them?

Mike Avara: 12:28

Right. So, I mean, to go to all the effort that we do, we're we've got a number of different questions we're looking at. Because they're found in Illinois during migration and kind of their winter stop over time, our our questions tend to focus more on those times. So one thing that we do is we try to determine the activity patterns of the birds during this time. So how active are they? Are they just sitting in one spot? Are they moving around a lot, hunting, foraging? Are they doing it more, like, one time a day than the other? That sort of thing. So we put transmitters on the birds that pulse every twelve and a half seconds. And then we've got, like, seven towers with antennas at Kennecott County Park, and those towers are just constantly monitoring the area to pick up the the pulses of these transmitters to see where the birds are moving, how much they're moving. And then also that those towers provide information about when the bird leaves to go further south or when it returns north if it stayed here for the entire winter.

Mike Avara: 13:34

We're also kind of looking at further kind of characterizing the behavior of the owls regarding their vocalizations. So I mentioned that we draw them in to the nets using a lure that the male actually uses on the breeding grounds. They also make these kind of kasu calls and these agitated whines, and and, you know, very rarely do we actually hear that territorial toot in Illinois. So, you know, try to get at, well, why is that? And why aren't they making this particular vocalization, but they're making other vocalizations? Or why is it that they're being drawn to this male territorial toot when the birds aren't breeding here? It doesn't quite make sense. And then finally, we're really looking more into what we call migratory connectivity for saw-whet owls.

Mike Avara: 14:27

So we're looking at the paths they take as they migrate north and south in the winter and back to the breeding season. These birds have been known to have very sporadic migration patterns. So, typically, when we think of birds migrating, we think of them migrating south to the Gulf of Mexico or points further south, like Central America, South America for the winter, and then they moved basically almost due north, you know, to get to their breeding grounds. While we have caught birds that were banded in Minnesota and Michigan and Wisconsin, that would be expected, we also caught birds that were banded in Pennsylvania, which is for those of us that aren't great at geography, that's not north of us. That's

Abigail Garofalo: 15:08

Right.

Mike Avara: 15:09

It's due east. So we the tags that we put on the birds, we actually they're a special type of tag called a motus tag that's picked up by motus towers in a network across the United States. So in putting these tags on the birds, we're getting a better idea of the exact path that the bird is taking as it's moving north or south for the winter. Or east or west.

Amy Lefringhouse: 15:38

Yeah. Right? So you're thinking that they're not following, like, the typical, like, flyway flyways pattern made possibly? Are you looking at that?

Mike Avara: 15:49

It it could be. I mean, there's a lot of speculation. The one thing I would say about our birds that were relocated or refound in Pennsylvania is more likely what happened because these were separate years. So it's likely that the bird migrated down to Illinois for one winter, then migrated back north, but then the next year, it migrated south towards Pennsylvania.

Amy Lefringhouse: 16:15

Sure.

Mike Avara: 16:16

But, again, when we think about those of us that are geographically challenged, you know, you know, what's the likelihood that you'd be able to return to the same spot, you know, one two winters in a row? Or

Amy Lefringhouse: 16:28

Right. Although those hummingbirds, you know, I just can't hardly believe that sometimes it seems that they are visiting the same spots.

Mike Avara: 16:37

Well, that's a good point because a lot of birds do have very good navigational skills, and you will have I mean, our lab also does work with whip-poor-wills, and there are whip-poor-wills that come back to the exact same spot within, you know, maybe 10 to 15 meters from one year to the next, and they're flying all the way down Mexico in that. You know?

Amy Lefringhouse: 17:00

They're I'm just gonna say they're just like us. Some are better at directions. Some are not.

Amy Lefringhouse: 17:05

Thawheads

Abigail Garofalo: 17:06

Saw-whets on the other hand. They out, they have

Amy Lefringhouse: 17:09

Great at hiding, but directionally challenged possibly.

Mike Avara: 17:14

And think about too. This is a small owl. You know? So it isn't necessarily, you know, an Olympic flyer in terms of, you know, being robust and very aerodynamic. I mean, they they're still able to fly and complete their migrations, but I'm sure because of their shape and because of their their structure that, you know, migration is a pretty intense energy draining, you know, activity for them.

Abigail Garofalo: 17:39

And I didn't know too if you there were other trends that you were seeing too or maybe things you can't speak on yet because you're still doing research.

Mike Avara: 17:46

Just as a teaser, one one really interesting thing is that when it comes to the birds that are actually caught in Illinois, seventy five to 80% of them are actually females. So most of the males, or, it would seem, are actually staying at points further north or, as crazy as this might sound, staying on their breeding territory through the middle of the winter in the Northern Great Lakes, which I can only imagine how cold, frigid, you know, diff

Abigail Garofalo: 18:19

All the ladies are leaving. Where's the breeding happening? What are they doing there? Now I do have a question, though. So because you're using, like, the male kind of territorial sound as your, like, almost lure, is that possibly, like, a confounding factor to, like, why you're seeing mainly females in the area? Like, the males are there you're just not trapping them.

Mike Avara: 18:40

Right. So that's a good point. And we do catch males in addition to females. But so it's not like we're just catching females. So the fact that it's still catching some males would indicate that, you know, there's probably not as much bias as we would think. And kind of jumping ahead too, we're part of a collaboration called Project Owlnet. So they we're just one or actually two of over a hundred different stations across The United States and Canada who have kind of adopted this methodology. They're finding the same things even in areas where the sex ratio is just a little bit more even. So it's it's just very bizarre.

Amy Lefringhouse: 19:21

So cool. A question about the transmitters or the tags. Do they once you put those on, do they do they stay with the bird? I just don't know a lot about bird research, but do they stay with that bird for the rest of its life?

Mike Avara: 19:37

So in a perfect world, what we would do is we would create a harness that would have the transmitter attached. And as soon as the battery to the transmitter would die, the harness would fall off. Mhmm. We do our best to kind of time that to about the same time by using materials that eventually over time will naturally degrade. So using some natural fibers as opposed to just, like, synthetic ones that are that are meant to really keep it on. But as you could probably imagine, it's not foolproof. I mean, you've got different individual owls, you know, wear the transmitter a different way or go through it, may maybe more rough and tumble than

Abigail Garofalo: 20:15

those are also those poorly directional owls. Well, they it's it's a correlation, in my opinion. They're just so

Mike Avara: 20:24

And remember too, I mean, we go back to they're hanging out in really rough vegetation, so the fact that they can snag and and and actually fall off is actually pretty.

Amy Lefringhouse: 20:34

So while you're in the field, what what is that what does a day in the field look like when you're doing that research then?

Mike Avara: 20:42

Yeah. So it's usually a really long day, even though the days are getting shorter usually when we're actually doing this. But that actually plays to our advantage because we're working with a nocturnal species.

Abigail Garofalo: 20:52

Mhmm.

Mike Avara: 20:53

So an hour before sunset every Tuesday and Thursday from mid October through the end of November, we're going out, putting out mist nets. The mist nets are these, like, 30 foot long by, like, eight foot high nets that are are they they're they're like mist. It's it it almost looks invisible to the human we've caught a few humans in them before. And and we catch them all.

Abigail Garofalo: 21:20

I wasn't sure if you were gonna go for humans. Yeah. I was like, sorry. You thought humans are you? I was like, is he gonna say humans? Like, in my head, I was processing.

Mike Avara: 21:31

And the worst part is the humans that we tend to catch are the ones who know that the net is there. But but yeah. So we place 15 mist nets out in a call box at the center of it, playing that territorial toot, and then we'll check the nets every forty five to sixty minutes. And and we'll do that typically five to six hours a night. And when we get to the net, if there's owl in there, of course, we'll extract the owl from the net.

Mike Avara: 21:56

And we put a band around the bird's leg so that if anybody else would catch the bird, they'd be able to know more information about where it had been. And then we place a backpack harness with a transmitter on its back. We take some measurements, wing cord and tail length and mass, and then we can age

Abigail Garofalo: 22:15

Sorry. Pause.

Mike Avara: 22:16

Yeah.

Abigail Garofalo: 22:17

Did you say backpack harness?

Mike Avara: 22:20

Backpack.

Abigail Garofalo: 22:21

When you said transmitter, I was like, oh, it goes on their little legs. How adorable. Like, no. No. They're, like, going to school with a little backpack.

Mike Avara: 22:29

Exactly. Right? Exactly. So, yeah, it's it's the the transmitter is kind of attached to their back, but it's got, like, two little straps that go over the wings, and then it kinda connects at the front. So

Amy Lefringhouse: 22:43

I'm envisioning WonderPets. Yeah. You know? Their little goggles on in there.

Mike Avara: 22:53

So yeah. And then once we age and sex it, the really cool thing, I guess, before I get ahead of myself, aging is really a neat thing. I guess with a podcast, you won't have a picture of it, but I can put this in the presentation. If you shine in UV or a black light on their wings, their feathers will actually light up bright pink, which is really cool.

Amy Lefringhouse: 23:15

Yeah.

Mike Avara: 23:16

And if all of them are pink on the bird, that means that they're a hatch year bird, meaning they were just born in, like, May or June of of that year. But then as owls age well, all birds age, actually, they replace feathers. And so if it's an older bird, you'll actually see gaps in the pink. So you'll just see, like, a dull brown feather and then surrounded by these bright pinks. So the patterns you actually see on the underside of the wing with the UV light will actually tell you how old it is.

Abigail Garofalo: 23:49

That's that's so cool. I love thinking about how we discovered that information.

Mike Avara: 23:54

Yeah.

Abigail Garofalo: 23:55

Like, somebody was just, like, either accidentally yeah. Like, I wonder what happens when we put UV light on it. Yes. And then, wow. That it's bright like this.

Mike Avara: 24:05

I wish I could say I discovered that or that I was there when it happened, but I wasn't, unfortunately. So and and, of course, we release the owls, and then, usually, we'll come back later in the week during the day, and we'll go out with a handheld antenna and a receiver. And we'll listen for those pings that the transmitter is actually creating at that specific frequency. And we just keep trying to walk the direction that it seems like the signal's coming from as it gets louder and louder, and we look like crazy, you know, all over the brush and then vines to try to figure out, you know, this is actually still on an owl or if the

Amy Lefringhouse: 24:45

Or is it

Mike Avara: 24:46

have fallen off. Or

Abigail Garofalo: 24:49

So the transmitter isn't, like, always sending its location. You have to have, like, a receiver telling you, like, an owl is near, essentially?

Mike Avara: 24:58

So so it is always when you turn the receiver on, well, the transmitter's always pulsing, and that's why eventually the battery dies on it because it's just constantly playing. And that's also why we have the towers that we do because the towers just automatically reporting those pulses twenty four seven. We end up with a lot of data. I think I had, like, 40 million, you know, detections of these transmitters. But and that's always what we spend this time of year doing is going through all of that data.

Mike Avara: 25:30

But we do have kind of an interesting playback experiment that we've been doing. So if I go out and I find where an owl is actually sitting or roosting at a bush or a vine or whatever, I'll actually stand between the closest tower and the owl right around dusk, and then I'll play like an audio clip, one of those three calls that I'd mentioned earlier. And then we can actually see if the bird's moving towards the sound or away from the sound based on if the transmitter signal is getting louder or softer, whether it's flying towards or away from the tower. And then, of course, we look for, you know, is the bird out, you know, making noises back at me, or is it flying around? And there's been a few times where they've actually called back at me, and it's real been really interesting. Or even if I go back to the tower and I look, I can actually see the signal changing all the different antennas. So you can see the owl actually circling the tower, which is kind of neat.

Abigail Garofalo: 26:31

It's like making calls back at you like, excuse me. This is my vacation. Supposed to be peaceful. Do you know what my summer life is like? Those boys never leave the breeding grounds.

Mike Avara: 26:48

Right. And and because we play different calls, we're trying to get at, you know, you know, what what does this call actually mean? What function does it have for the app? So I'm sure we're already starting to get a little bit of indication that these calls, the owls do respond differently to them. So

Abigail Garofalo: 27:05

Well, so you mentioned Owlnet, that like, larger network. Tell us a little bit about Project Owlnet.

Mike Avara: 27:11

Right. So Project Owlnet was born, like, twenty, twenty five years ago maybe when they were first starting to realize that they could use this toot call to actually catch saw-whet owls. Prior to that, nobody knew how to catch them. And there was major information gap in in the species, what we knew about it. And so they developed a protocol, standardized protocol that banding stations across the United States and Canada use.

Mike Avara: 27:41

And then data is sometimes collected from multiple stations for the purpose of furthering our knowledge about the species. So if you have several stations, several scientists, whether they're citizen scientists or research scientists at institutions, combining all that data and and trying to trying to determine more of of what trends or patterns, you know, might be going on with this particular species. We have Project Owlnet stations at Kennecott County Park near Danville and then at Allerton Park near Monticello. Although in Illinois, there's also a station up at Sand Bluff Bird Observatory up near Rockford. And then kind of one thing that this collaboration allows is to kinda help facilitate larger projects, especially future initiatives.

Mike Avara: 28:27

So one big future initiative that we're planning on doing or participating in is the deployment of over 300 transmitters in the coming year to actually track saw-whet owl migration across their entire range out from, you know, all the way over in Nova Scotia to British Columbia down to California and Georgia even because there's a lot of unknowns, and we have a whole network of motus towers to be able to pick those birds up as they migrate. So really a large scale effort. Most years, we only put out at Kenneckeuk maybe about 20 transmitters, but we're limited in just by, you know, the number of volunteers and and the cost of the transmitter. So doing this on a much larger level gives us more data and gives us more ideas what actually is going on as we try to piece it together.

Amy Lefringhouse: 29:19

Is Owlnet specifically focused on saw-whet owls? Or

Mike Avara: 29:23

It is. Yep. Just on saw-whets. One of the big things we're trying to figure out, again, you know, how prevalent are they? Because when it comes to species, a lot of times we want to know are they at risk? Are they

Amy Lefringhouse: 29:36

Right.

Mike Avara: 29:36

Are they endangered or threatened? It's really hard for these species where you can't really detect them by just walking outside and looking and listening.

Abigail Garofalo: 29:44

Yeah. That's one of those things that, you know, you realize when you become an adult. I guess maybe this isn't everyone who realizes this, but, you know, you can't just be like, how many insects are there in Illinois? Or how many how many coyote are in Chicago? Like, that's actually a lot more difficult to to, get a number on than than people think. And so

Mike Avara: 30:01

Exactly.

Abigail Garofalo: 30:02

Well, thank you so much, Mike, for taking the time to share your knowledge on owls and saw-whets and all of the amazing work that you're doing. You mentioned volunteers, and I'm sure if some people hearing this will be like, how do I sign up to help band owls? Put their little backpacks on, get them ready. So but now it's time for special light. It's the point of the show where you get to shine a light on something cool you saw in nature this month, and I'll have Amy go first.

Amy Lefringhouse: 30:34

Well, I'm gonna I'm gonna stick with our, theme today of talking about birds and bird banding, I was able to go to Springfield and be a part of the Lincoln Land Bird Banders banding station over there with Tony Rothering and folks. And we did some of the stuff that you were talking about, Mike. Were able to go check the mist nets, and Tony was able to I mean, we got see the birds. We got to hold them in our hand and release them, and he was able to share with us. You know, everyone loves to ID birds, and we try to ID them, you know, by sound, and we try to ID them by by binocular, but when you when you band them, you have them in your hand. And it was really neat to see all the different ways that he and the the crew used to identify and and maybe even, you know, determine if they're male or female, whether it was like blowing on the feathers to see the the different colors of their crests on the top of their head and just seeing birds that you don't get to see but far away right up close. So that was kind of a neat experience. And I think they were I think maybe at Lincoln Land Community College, possibly, they were talking about doing some saw-whet owl netting mistnetting in the coming, I guess, weeks at that point in time. So that was a few weeks back. But but, anyway, it was a really cool experience.

Abigail Garofalo: 32:09

That's so cool. I that's one experience I never really got in college and that I've never done actually is to, like, help band a bird or even hold a bird in my hand like that because I know I always see, like, the picture. I'm sure I'm talking to the crowd here who has a pair because Amy's just admitted it. Obviously, Mike has. So I'm I feel a little left out today. But so that's so cool. I love that. Like, I don't know. Just kinda seeing that you get to they get to point out and be like, yeah. This is the feature that makes this type of sparrow this type or whatever, and that's so neat. So well, Mike, you're up next.

Mike Avara: 32:46

Yeah. As as much as I'd like to keep talking about owls, this time of year, what's really kind of fascinating, you know, as I I sit here at Turner Hall looking out the window from the fourth floor is, you know, as as the evening starts to starts to come in, it seems like it just comes, you know, earlier and earlier every day. On campus here, a phenomena we've had for several years is that just large flocks of crows start to gather and form just these huge roosts for the night, and it's really fascinating to watch all their acrobatics in the sky and how they come in their various different groups. I mean, crows are just such smart birds, and and there's so much we don't know about them. And and, I mean, this just barely scratches the surface. But being able to watch that phenomena as as the sun starts to go down, and, know, it really makes you wonder, you know, what what all is at play? Where are these birds even from? Because, I mean, crows there are many, many more crows here this time of year than people realize, and than other times of the year. They have migrated, some of them usually from points north. And, you know, it's so hard for us to tell just on a very surface level as we look up what individuals are from here. Where did that crow come from? Where is it going back, and and where are they going to roost? So many really neat questions about, you know, a bird that a lot of times people just dismiss as, oh, it's just a large, black, drab bird, but so many mysteries to unlock.

Amy Lefringhouse: 34:16

I had a, I guess, student at a camp that I worked at, and she was just an exceptional student. And her they're part of the Corvid family. Right?

Mike Avara: 34:25

Right. That's right.

Amy Lefringhouse: 34:26

Corvid ay, Corvid. Mhmm. She would be she loved she's like, anything in the Corvid family, I am just a fan of any they're smart. They're I mean, she was just a fanatic about the Corvid family of birds, and I thought that was just very interesting because she was like a, you know, 14, 15 year old. Have that kind of, you know, interest I thought was kinda kinda cool and unique.

Abigail Garofalo: 34:50

Yeah. I feel like that though, like, that's where the niche starts. Right? Like, it's like the dinosaur version of, like, kids too. They're like, I'm obsessed with this specific species of dinosaur. Right? True. That's fun. I was just gonna say too, Mike, I feel like, ask us in two year like, we'll check-in with you in two years. You might be studying crows instead of saw-whets.

Amy Lefringhouse: 35:11

Yeah.

Abigail Garofalo: 35:11

So

Mike Avara: 35:14

Yeah. I like all types of birds. That's for sure. And and it's always interesting to see the commonalities from one species or one group to another or lack thereof. Like I said, when we can when we're talking about migration and saw was, you know. The ones that don't obey the rule.

Amy Lefringhouse: 35:30

Right.

Abigail Garofalo: 35:31

True. Well, I will go mine is not bird related. I am not a bird person. I've I just I don't know what it is about bird calls. It's like I cannot hear the differences in a lot of them. I really struggle. So but I'm gonna talk about something way more mundane and less cool than you two both shared. I have, like, a little garden in my backyard, and I planted thyme a year ago. It's not a native plant, but it's still nature because it's growing outside. And I went to go make myself chicken potpie.

Abigail Garofalo: 36:04

It's, like, my favorite recipe, and it's a it calls for thyme. And I was like, I wonder if my thyme is still good, and it's still green. It's the December, and it's still green, and I'm gonna eat it. And so I was just so shocked to and I, like, haven't gotten a chance to look into, like, what the heck is going on with thyme that it survives these kinds of freezing weathers and and temperature changes and things like that, that it is the only green thing in my garden right now outside of weeds, which makes me a little concerned about the fact that I planted it in the ground as well. So so, yeah, so that's my little spotlight because I just could I just thought it was really amazing, and now I can still use it as a plant right now. So

Amy Lefringhouse: 36:45

Very interesting.

Abigail Garofalo: 36:47

Well, this has been another episode of Spotlight on Natural Resources podcast. Thank you so much, Mike, for taking the time to chat with us. Check out next month where we'll talk with Peggy Anesi about phenology. It'll be a whole new year 2024.