Ava-2/25/09-Screech Owl Walk in Central Park

On Wednesday, Shulian and I (and my parents) met Bob DeCandido at Central Park at 5:00pm. Shulian got to meet him for the first time! Bob (and his wife) set up a private owl walk for us, for our project, which was nice of him (we are going to thank him soon). This time we didn’t just look for screech owls, but we saw them! (See picture below. I could not get the video to work.) But let me start from the beginning. Shulian and I were freezing the whole time (again), but it was all worth it. We started walking into the woodsy part of the park to search for owls. Bob showed us some tree cavities that owls might live in (see pictures below). With a tape measure, Shulian and I measured the height up to the top of the tree cavity. We also measured around the tree, to find the circumference. (These measurements are written below.) We also asked Bob some questions. Once again, my camera ran out of memory so I took notes. My goal for next time is to definitely make sure I have a free memory card! So, we kept standing there and looking up at trees. As we were waiting, we actually saw a raccoon peeking down at us from a tree branch! His little face just appeared and then disappeared again. As it got darker and darker, I didn’t think we’d be so lucky in seeing owls. But all of a sudden, we saw a silhouette fly by! A little screech owl landed on a tree and started trilling his call! Then, he moved to another tree, along with a second owl. Screech owls are way smaller than I expected. Unfortunately, the owl came out because he was telling us to go away, resulting from the bird-calling machine that Bob was using again (see picture below). This visit really confirmed that there is lots of controversy over those bird-calling machines. Again, when the owl was making his trilling and hooting noises, a lady came over to us and asked Bob, “That’s the owl, right, making those noises, and not a tape?” Shulian and I were actually laughing, not because of what they were talking about, but the lady’s tone—when Bob said sarcastically, “Oh, I don’t think we’ve met before,” the lady said in a real snotty tone, “You know who we are, it’s just that your memory is as bad as your knowledge of owls!” Then, a bit after, when Bob was whistling to the owl, the lady said, “OH PLEASE!” which made Shulian and I laugh at her even harder. However, Bob had something to say to the lady. He thinks that watching the owls every night consecutively can really interfere with them. When he asked her if she watched the owls every night, she answered yes. He told her what he thought, but she didn’t listen. In this case, I agree with both sides, that both of them are wrong. Bob also told us that, if you use the bird-calling machine too much, the owls won’t come out because they are so used to it, so they don’t take it as much of a threat. Aside from the arguing, we learned many things on this visit:

• Bob believes that it takes several years to determine if screech owls are actually “sustainable.” Over a shorter period of time, like 2 or 3 years, the project is easier to predict the outcome of, as opposed to 10 years or so. The question is, in the words of Bob, “Are the owls breeding and will they establish a small enough population to be sustainable?”
• Bob told us about a lady that we might go see, Marie Winn, who thinks that this project is a just a publicity stunt, and that it wasn’t done correctly (more controversy!). Marie Winn also wrote the book Central Park in the Dark (which my mom actually read!).
• Bob gave us something to think about: Why are great horned owls doing so much better in population than screech owls, in New York City?
• Bob compares determining why the owls left the park in the first place, in the 1950’s, with determining what a person dies from. He said the owls could’ve left for a variety of reasons, possibly a combination of reasons. These reasons are: pesticides, low initial population (making it harder to reproduce), and the Parks Department cutting down dead trees. Cutting down the trees is a problem because screech owls don’t like to travel far, and could have trouble finding a new home.
• Bob thinks that the population of squirrels could be a threat to the owl population because they are noisy and owls don’t like that.
• I asked Bob what he thought of my idea: if sparrows decline, do owls also decline, since owls eat sparrows? He didn’t really think that would be true.
• Raccoons are predators of owls. If people feed raccoons, there are too many, causing the decline of owls. Bob’s theory is: The population of one animal=the decline of another.
• He explains that it is good that naturally some owls die, otherwise there would be overpopulation. However, there are some problems with releasing owls into an unfamiliar urban park. Along with staying alive, they have to face the hazards that come with living in an urban park.
• These current problems could be pesticides (which the park doesn’t use so much anymore), fast-moving traffic, and leaving the park for food (due to less rodents) requiring the owls to learn the city environment as well. These problems are very similar to the ones that are causing them to disappear now.
• Owls would always come back to the park after leaving it for food. Bob compared this with us going to school in the day and then coming home afterward.
• When owls leave the park, it is dangerous because of the traffic outside the park. Bob said that if we still had horses and buggies, the owls would be fine. He explained that owls could see a mouse across the street and swoop down low, without looking at their surroundings, getting in the way of a car and getting hit.
• To keep this project going, there are probably going to have to be owls released into the park on a regular basis, to sustain them. Bob said that some people could think of that as either a success or a failure, because the goal is to eventually not have to keep releasing the owls, but get to a point where the owls can sustain themselves. Bob said this goal would take many years to meet.
• Owls nest lower than 20 feet.
• Some signs in finding where owls live are feathers and whitewash (owl defecation) on the ground.
• Like Sunny the park ranger, Bob believes that getting people informed about owls and parks is very important in sustaining the owl population.

I know that some of this information is the same as in the interview with Sunny the park ranger. I am comparing information. Watching the owls was absolutely amazing. It was like you saw another side of New York City, a hidden part of it. The owls are SO cute. It is the first time I’ve seen one in the wild! It makes me really excited and motivated to continue the project. The Photos Below: The first picture is of the screech owl in the tree. The black blob in the middle is him/her. The second, third, and fourth pictures are tree cavities that screech owls nested in during the past years. The fifth picture is of Bob’s bird-calling machine. The sixth picture is of Shulian and I measuring the height up to the tree cavity (the same tree in the first tree cavity picture). The height is about 16 feet and the circumference is 5 feet. We also measured another tree, which had a height of about 18 feet and a circumference of 7 feet 3 inches.