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The northern saw-whet owl is named for the raspy call it makes - it sounds like a saw being sharpened. If you're going to name an owl after it's sound, then the saw-whet should be called the "backing-up-sound-of-a-truck-owl." I say this because: 1. The sound I've heard them make - continuously - is like the annoying "beep-beep-beep" of a commercial truck while reversing, and; 2. I've never heard them make any other sound. This owl seen here would make a nightly visit to an adjacent canyon to where I lived on Catalina Island (about 30 miles off the coast of Long Beach, California) . Knowing the area well, I would, most every night of every month in spring, grab my camera and hike in the dark over to the tall group of eucalyptus trees. He was amazing in his ability to throw his voice; a mere turn of his head and his call would reverberate off different canyon walls or groups of trees and I would go searching elsewhere. After triangulating for weeks on end I finally figured out the tree he was sitting in but I still couldn't find him; the tree I was looking in was 60-80 feet high and he is only six inches tall. At some point in the night he would stop calling and I would go home. This went on and on. |
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There was a comical two week period or so where, much to my friends entertainment, I would hear him call for 20 or 30 minutes, finally decide to go after him, grab my camera, put on my boots, open the door to leave, and he would stop. I would stand in the doorway for five minutes waiting for him to start again, go inside, put my camera up, take off my boots, and he would start. Since the beeping was actually his mating call, my friends would joke that he was so confused with hormones that he was trying to lure in desperate photographers. This was the teasing part of our courtship. This little forest dance went on from March to June for two years. When the signs of mental deteriation from island life began to show (I was, afterall, spending my nights chasing horny owls!) I decided to leave the island. About a month before I left, at the end of a night where I spent three or four hours in the dark in a forest, still without ever having even seen him, much less photograph him, he flew down to a branch fifteen feet up, ten feet away. I took a few quick images and then I think that he decided that photographers just weren't his type because he flew off. When people have asked me about this image and I've told them the story, I am usually asked how I could spend so much time chasing a single owl. This is just one of the disadvantages of being a nature photographer: I spent peaceful nights in a quiet forest observing nature. Darn! |