What Does it Sound Like When an Owl Talks with Her Mouth Full?

by Trina

That is but one of the many important questions about screech owls we didn't even realize we had, to which answers are streaming in each night via the nest cam.

DH always talks to B when he brings her food. It usually sounds like this:



Recently, however, he brought her something that seemed particularly hard to get down, and she tried to talk to him in the midst of chewing:



If you listen carefully here, you can hear B outside calling to DH at :46 and 1:00, before delivering food:



This is what it looks like when DH snuggles herself down onto the eggs. (She leaves the nest a couple of times a night for 15 minutes or so, usually when B hasn't brought her food for a few hours.This is what she does when she returns.)




On April 1, B made two dinner deliveries within less than a minute (unless that first interaction was merely him checking in...?)



Based on our outside-the-nest observations last year, we know that our screech owls eat a lot of cockroaches and sphinx moths, but the small things B has been delivering have been impossible to see in the nest cam videos. Once in a while it's possible to see that it was something small and black, but beyond that, we haven't been able to identify most of what they're eating. Now and then, however, B snags a bird, which we can see, briefly, before B sits right in front of the camera: