Woodland Dunes keeps tabs on northern saw-whet owl

By SARAH KLOEPPING
Herald Times Reporter, Manitowoc

TWO RIVERS, Wis. (AP) - Woodland Dunes Nature Center & Preserve is hoping to get a bird's-eye view of migration patterns of the state's smallest owl.

Volunteers are working to catch and band northern saw-whet owls - most of which grow to no more than 8 inches in height - to help with research occurring in the Midwest, which Woodland Dunes has been a part of since 1965.

The banding season usually runs from the end of September through mid-November, when the owls are migrating from northern Wisconsin and Canada.

"We are the gatherers of data," said Bernie Brouchoud, one of Woodland Dunes' founders who has helped band the owls since the program began. "This time of year, this is one of the most common birds around here, and they are all over . but you never see them, and you never hear them because they do not fly if there is even a hint of light."

About 110 owls have been caught so far this year, and about 200 were caught last year. Brouchoud said the number of owls Woodland Dunes sees each year depends on weather conditions.

"If we get some good northwest winds yet in the next two weeks, we could get 200," he said.

So far this year, the most owls caught at Woodland Dunes in one night was 26. The record is 72.

To catch the birds, a tape of owl calls is played and nets are put up at night. The owls then fly into the nets without being injured.

A group of volunteers who call themselves the "Night Gang" take shifts beginning at 9 p.m. and continuing every two hours through 3 a.m. to check for owls that may have flown into the nets.

"If we find an owl, we've been trained how to safely remove it from the net," said Anne Schuette, one of about 15 "Night Gang" members. "We try to cover the whole night so the owls are not in the net for more than a couple hours. It's a team effort."

Once the owls are removed from the nets, they are placed into a wooden compartment unit until morning, when a licensed bander documents when they were born (based on their feather coloring), whether they're male or female and their length and weight before banding and releasing them.

"We weigh him before we band him, because otherwise the weight of the band throws it off," Brouchoud said while recently banding a 1.6-gram owl. "If we catch somebody else's banded bird, we don't take the band off."

Brouchoud said all the bands have tracking numbers on them, and if they catch a bird that already has been banded, it's documented.

"Since we started banding we've gotten over 1,000 birds that we catch again, whether they are ours or somebody else's or whatever," Brouchoud said. "That's a high number."

Of the owls banded at Woodland Dunes, the furthest location one was found again was North Carolina.

"And we got recoveries from Rockford, Ill., western Indiana and North Carolina. So, we know some of them at least go that far," Brouchoud said. "We want to find out where they go, how long it takes them to get there. It all depends on somebody else catching one. When do they come back? Do they come back to the same spot?"

Schuette said she's known about Woodland Dunes since high school and has been volunteering for the last 15 years because helping to gather data now can help future generations determine patterns of the owls' migration.

"If you don't have the information, it's hard to compare things," she said. "When they're looking at things like climate change and how it affects species or even pollution, wind towers or anything like that, it's hard to go backwards if you don't have that data."

Once the owls are documented and tagged, Brouchoud checks to make sure they are not injured before releasing them again into low-level trees.

"The welfare of the owls is always number one," he said.

(Copyright 2011 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)

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