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:
It turns out that when an owl lays an egg and then vanishes at 8pm on a night when it’s 33 degrees, leaving the egg uncovered for the entire night, it doesn’t mean she has abandoned the nest after laying only a single egg. You can mourn and grieve and kick yourself for putting a strange new camera in the nest box and ruining everything, but in the morning you'll realize that all that fretting and despair was for naught.
It turns out that owls don’t lay all their eggs at once. They lay one every 2 or 3 days, and don’t start incubating them until the entire clutch is laid. And the eggs are just fine not being kept warm in the meantime. At least that's our theory at this point. There isn’t actually a lot of information available on the nesting behavior of screech owls, probably because all of their activity happens in the dark, making them hard to observe, so we haven’t found any official literature to confirm this theory. We did, however, find multiple sources citing this pattern in birds other than owls. Those sources say that birds do this so that the eggs don’t hatch all at once, suddenly giving the parents four or six or ten hungry mouths to feed. Ultimately they will have all those chicks to feed at the same time, but staggering the hatching increases their survival rate.
This appears to be what’s happening here in our nest. On the night in question, when it looked like DH had abandoned the nest, and all was lost, so soon, after a mere three days, she came back at sunrise, preened a bit, finished off the last of something dead she had drug in with her, tucked her single egg underneath her, fluffed and ruffed, and dozed off to sleep. And then she did it again. Twice. She stayed out all night for the next two nights, with no apparent concern for the solitary, cold egg she’d left behind.
(That's a sparrow carcass in the lower right corner.)
And then, three days after the first egg, she laid a second one. A third egg came two days after that, a fourth in another three days, and THEN she started sitting on them for most of the night. With incubation apparently underway, we thought that must mean that the clutch was complete at four eggs. But on the night of March 29, ten days after the first egg was laid, a fifth egg appeared.
Now she is definitely in incubation mode, staying on the eggs almost the entire night while B delivers cockroaches, crickets, moths and sparrows to her.
She does leave for up to an hour at a time, presumably to go find something to eat. This video shows one of those instances, when B arrived at the nest with a dead bird for her, only to find her absent:
Word on the internet is that incubation lasts 28 days, so if all goes well for the next few weeks, we can expect the first egg to hatch on April 25ish.
One thing we didn't know about owls: they're punctual. I've been watching the calendar, counting the days, sitting on the edge of my proverbial seat as March 19 drew nearer. That is the date last year that we first noticed that our male had found a mate and that she was ensconced in the nest box.
Owl activity has definitely been heating up around here for the last few months, with both owls checking in at the nest box increasingly frequently, and a pattern has emerged in which the male, Boyle (Boy+owl) goes into the box, calls to the female, DH (DerOwl Hannah) from inside, scratches around in the pine shavings as though plumping the cushions for her, hops up into the hole, calls from there, and then leaves the box, followed by DH going into the box and giving it a thorough inspection. Call it anthropomorphizing, but it sure looks to us like Boyle is trying to convince DH to reuse this nest site. This sequence, with variations, has lasted from 4 to 6 minutes each time, and occurred on January 10 and 22, February 4 and 26, and most recently on March 11 (video above).
Most concerning throughout the winter, as DH has been checking in, is her apparent discomfort with the camera. It is, of course, a new addition since she nested in this box last year, and we didn't think to put camouflage tape over it, and it does have an eyeball-like lens, and it surely makes noise when it is activated by the owls' movements, all of which might be reason to reject this nesting site... but in her last few visits to the box, she has, at last, quit staring suspiciously at the camera, and, finally, as of this morning, she appears to have come home to roost. She arrived at 6:17, as the morning was just beginning to brighten, and instead of just her usual brief check-in, she settled in, scritched around a bit and gradually drifted off to sleep for the day. Yes, oh yes, there is video of an owl going to sleep, here. Boyle is also back in his sleeping spot in a pine tree near the nest box.
Now that they've arrived for the nesting season not merely on time, but a day early, we fully expect adherence to the following strict schedule, based on last year:
Mar 19 DH moves in
(?) lay egg #1
(?) lay egg #2
(?) lay egg #3
(?) lay egg #4
Apr (late?) #1 hatch
#2 hatch
#3 hatch
#4 hatch
May 12 owlets start appearing in hole
May 24 fledge, but stay in the area
June 14 departure
June 24 Boyle returns alone
July 13 DH returns
