A Song for August 15
If the playback aborts before the end, trying playing the sound from inside the checklist.
Great Horned Owls are common and tolerant of people. I hear them often in my neighborhood, which is solidly residential.
But, they often seem to be in the distance. It's easy to record them, but not easy to record them up close. On this occasion,
I heard one nearby and followed it down McBeth Road until I could get a clear "shot" at it. It's a majestic sound.
The cut below is after it had moved off a bit.
Great Horned Owls are
birds of lore. I will repeat one yarn here, told by fellow South Carolinian
Alexander Sprunt. As I recall, I read it the A. C. Bent series, Life Histories of North American Birds,
a wonderful source of anecdotes. But, I may have read it in Sprunt and Chamberlain's South Carolina
Birdlife. In the days of raptor persecution, which Sprunt and many other conservationists opposed
mightily and ultimately successfully, the raptor-haters would use pole traps to kill the hawks on their land.
They didn't mind that they also killed owls. A baited leg-hold trap would be secured to the top of a fence post
in an open field. When a raptor landed on the post to take the bait, its feet would become entangled, and there it would remain until
dispatched, or more likely until it starved to death.
Sprunt once visited a property that deployed such traps
and happened to see a Great Horned Owl flying around in broad daylight with a fencepost trailing below it.
He was very impressed that an owl weighing three pounds was strong enough to pull a fence post out of the ground
and then carry it off. He was even more impressed to return some time later and see a Great Horned dragging around
two fence posts. Great Horneds do kill skunks, which are pretty big animals. Maybe the the traps were deployed on
tobacco stakes or some other lightweight stock rather than a heavy fence post. Or maybe it's just a good story.
Either way, don't take Great Horned Owls lightly.
SOURCES
In writing the commentary for these posts I have made extensive use of the invaluable
bioacoustic resources listed below. For phylogenetic information, I often start with a web
search of "Phylogeny of x," where x is an avian genus, family, or order. That is a hit-or-miss
proposition. A recently-released
resource that makes phylogenetic queries more systematic is the
Birds of the World
website from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. If you follow the link and type the name of an
avian family into the search box, you will be able to visit a home page for that family that presents
the number of genera and species, and an illustration for each genus.
If you subscribe, you will get more information.
Also available to subscribers is the Birds of the World species accounts.
Rolled out in 2020, this is currently an amalgam of the Birds of North America series, that was initiated by
the American Ornithologists' Union around 1990, a recently-initiated online equivalent for Neotropical Birds,
and the Handbook of Birds of the World series that was produced
by Lynx Edicions, also beginning in the 90s. BNA has been hosted by the Lab of O for some time, and they recently
added HBW to their portfolio. Especially useful for my purposes is the Systematics History subsection of the BNA accounts.
EBird still has its separate species pages for all the birds of the world. These feature photos, recordings, range maps, and
numerical eBird statistics, but little text. Overall, the abundance and availability of resources is astounding. Never has so
much been available to so many for so little.
INVALUABLE RESOURCES
Nathan D. Pieplow. 2017.
Peterson Field Guide to Bird Sounds of Eastern North America. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Nathan D. Pieplow. 2019.
Peterson Field Guide to Bird Sounds of Western North America. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Donald Kroodsma. 2005.
The Singing Life of Birds. Houghton Mifflin.