A short distance behind Kearsarge High School sits a small part of a continent-wide effort to understand a species that has one very important trait: Cuteness.
“Oh, they’re just adorable,” said Carrie Deegan of the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests as she led a group of spectators, including me, to the Black Mountain Banding Station last Thursday night.
There we found a folding table, a portable light, and former Kearsarge teacher and now N.H. Audubon biologist Lindsay Herlihey with a half-dozen volunteers. They have been staking out the site this fall to put ID bands on legs of the tiny Northern Saw-whet owls to help understand their migration patterns.
Alas, no owls were caught that night, perhaps because it was unusually warm and they were busy hunting instead of migrating, so can’t give an eyewitness confirmation of adorableness. But they sure are cute in pictures.
They also have an interesting backstory compared to most species in widespread data-gathering networks. Usually such projects, often with a big citizen-science component, are launched because the species is in danger. That’s not the case with saw-whet owls.
“When they’re migrating, there’s hardly a forest in this state where you wouldn’t be able to find one if you know where to look,” Herlihey told us. “They’re very common. It’s just that they’re sneaky.”
As Herlihey explained, decades ago it was thought that saw-whet owls were rare, so field biologists launched a program to find and study them, only to discover that when you searched systematically, there they were.
Now the Black Mountain site on Forest Society property, with indirect help from N.H. Audubon, is one of three in New Hampshire (the others are the Harris Center in Hancock and Pin Mountain near Conway) and 125 or so in North America that are part of Project OwlNet. That 32-year-old network uses standardized methods during fall and spring migration times, when populations from Canada and elsewhere move through the area, to catch owls in “mist nets” and band their legs before releasing them.
Mist nets are made of very fine nylon and have long been used to capture, study and release birds and small mammals in the wild. The Kearsarge site uses five of them, three meters tall and 12 meters wide, and a recording of a male owl’s mating call to lure in the curious.
They aren’t limited to the cute saw-whet owls. (That name, incidentally, refers to the way some think their call sounds — like a saw being sharpened on a whetstone.) Barred owls, which like to eat saw-whet owls, also come around unless the volunteers can scare them off. And sometimes there are other creatures, including flying squirrels.
“Last year there were a lot of them. It turns out they bite — they bit hard,” Herlihey said.
A variety of measurements are taken from each bird, like the length of wings from wrist to tip of longest flight feather, length of the longest tail feature, a body condition scoring system to evaluate health, and of course their weight on a small digital scale. The owls are so small that they can be held inside a 6-ounce tomato can.
When this is done, they are released by being held on a volunteer’s open hand.
“They decide when they leave our hands. We place them so they’re unencumbered; sometimes they’ll chill there for a surprising amount of time,” Herlihey said. “They know they’re free but they choose not to fly until they’re ready.”
The Kearsarge station, which operates five nights a week, has banded almost three dozen owls this season. The team members will continue for a couple of more weeks until migrations slow down, then gather their data and share it with the OwlNet site, as well as federal and state wildlife bodies.
The idea of all this, of course, is to get a better idea of how the population of this one species is doing, where it goes, and how it interacts with the environment. The project is in the process of rolling out radiotelemetry devices that will be attached to some birds, letting us know where they go after they are banded.
Similar programs exist for plenty of other species. My daughter, for example, once worked on a research project that put radio tracking devices on tortoises (which don’t fly away but can be surprisingly hard to find) and there’s a long-running program called MAPS that gathers information on songbirds and is quite popular in the Northeast.
Why do this? Because information is useful in ways that are both expected and unexpected. That’s kind of the whole point of science.
Saw-whet owls, for example, are a predator of mice. Mice carry ticks. We don’t like ticks. Knowing how the owl population is doing, whether the timing of its migration or the local population is changing, is one variable to consider when planning tick mitigation or Lyme disease forecasting.
Further, a long-running study like this, with set protocols practiced over a big area and many years, can stumble across important trends that nobody even thought to ask about. Probably not, but you never know unless you try.
In the meantime, be thankful there are people who think it’s fun and rewarding to sit in dark woods for several hours listening for an irritated owl stuck in a net that will happily bite them if it gets a chance, which it probably will. Without such folks, where would science be?
