2 April 2008.  This is slowly shaping up to be a very quiet spring.  My first round of surveys has been completed and largely without many of the familiar songs and calls that serve as my navigational compass.  While I miss the song of the boreal owl, it is good to be participating in the process of discovery and for a doddering yet effusive biologist, that is all it takes.  I'll be a regular contributor to the wacky world of  Son of Blog and invite you to visit it and get a sense of the unraveling of winter and the blossoming of spring.  And remember: 

"We common mortals, who cannot see in the dark, know very little about the courtship performance of the owls, except what we can learn from listening to their springtime voices" (A.C. Bent 1937).      

	I don't have DISH...I have a deer carcass.  A male fisher in for lunch (17 March 2008)	Another recent visitor to the deer carcass ( 31 March 2008)

Please respect the Copyright protection of all text and photos on any of my sites.  If you want to use something.....ASK!!!! 

24 June 2006.  Ma-swet.  Already banded, still hanging tight with her brood.		24 June 2006. Four "ready to roll" saw-whets await USFWS bands and the opportunity to poop on the biologist. Note the adled egg in foreground

7 May 2006.  Four boreal owlets surrounded by 13 dead voles...mostly red-backed with a couple of meadow voles thrown in.  This box will smell yummy in a couple of weeks.	The luckiest shot I have ever taken.	6 May 2006.  A newly hatched boreal owl.  And I mean newly hatched...probably 2 days old.  Three eggs are ready to join him/her.
A nest of 4 newly-hatched saw-whets, surrounded by 8 fat, red-backed voles.	A female boreal at the box entrance.	A female saw-whet waits for the nest-check to end
For 3 glorious, Strigidaen weeks, a northern hawk owl was my close neighbor.	Winter does not get any better than this.	7 May  2006.  A saw-whet nest with 6 eggs.  There is lichen and moss in the nest, and I didn't put it there...so who did?

The following was written during the 2001 irruption, but it applies today.  In fact, it will apply for every irruption during our lifetime.