After work tonight, I was outside with Bella and the air felt just right for screech owls. I don't know if that is even possible, but some nights just do not seem to me to be right for owls. As I was letting Bella back into the house, I thought I heard a soft, low tone of a screech owl off to my left, but the power vent on the boiler was on and loud enough to drown out an owl. I stood on the deck and began to mimic the owl. Now, I've never thought that my screech owl imitation was very good, but it does yield some results as seen in this post. The power vent stopped and, though there was a slight breeze, it was nearly perfect for hearing owls. It was also late (or early?) enough that the noise level from the highway was not too bad.
Standing on the deck worked out to be the perfect spot. I had some lights on in the house which cast enough light to the outdoors to be able to see the owl fly by. Owl flight is silent, so having some light was a plus. It swooped rather low right over my head. I ducked a bit out of instinct, or fear.
Years ago in upstate New York, I was mimicking saw-whet owls which are rather small, when one came seemingly out of nowhere. There was enough light that I saw it coming, ducked and as I did so it grabbed my hat with it's talons. I read some time later that saw-whet are rather tame and there have been accounts of them landing on the shoulders of people mimicking them, so perhaps it's intentions were not malicious.
Back to the screech owl.... The owl flew by a few times before finally landing in the maple just near the deck. I had great views of it, but by the time I extricated the camera from it's multi-faceted layers of security and returned to the deck, I could not get it to come back to the tree despite quite a bit of lip-drying whistling. A nice way to end a hectic night.
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