Barn Owls -- an interview

by Tom

I interviewed Norman Smith, the director of the Blue Hills Trailside Museum about Barn owls. He studies birds of prey (especially Snowy Owls) He was really nice and very helpful to my project. Here are a few of my favorite questions and answers

How did you get interested in owls?
Well, I guess I was about 10 and birds that flew around in the sky, like hawks, always fascinated me as well as owls. Owls came out at night so they were really mysterious and that got me interested even more. And then I came and volunteered here when I was 14 and then started working here when I got out of high school and I've been here ever since.

I read about your banding hawks. Have you done that with owls too?
Yes, we do band snowy owls. Here's an article on the snowy owls at Logan airport that was in Yankee magazine, that's all about the research. My daughter, who is fifteen, has a project where she bands migrating owls at another Audubon Sanctuary in Marshfie ld. She catches them with a mist net as they come through. This year she caught 47 saw-whet owls and a long-eared owl and a screech owl.

So you're keeping track of them?
Yes, and this is a site where no one ever saw Saw-Whet owls before. It's a place where a lot of birders go to see birds but historically no one had ever seen a saw whet owl until last year, when she set up this project. Last year she saw seven Saw- Whets and this year she got 47. They migrate in the fall. That gives you an idea of how little we know about owls. They come out at night so they're hard to study. We can't see very well at night so they re harder to watch. We have a night vision scope that we use for the owls but even with that it can be difficult because your eyes get very tired using the night vision scope all the time. They move so quickly it's hard to keep track of them. Their hearing is so good that if you're walking around the woods, t hey generally take off long before you get there.

Barn Owls are a species of "special concern." What does that mean?
In Massachusetts, they rate things endangered, threatened, and special concern. When an animal gets to be less and less common, and we think they're declining--getting to be fewer and fewer than there were ten years ago, they call it "special concern." If they study the animal after that and discover that, yes, its not breeding as much, not producing as much offspring as it was, then it becomes an animal that's threatened. And if it gets to the point that it's not producing as many babies to replace the a dults then it becomes endangered. So if we say a barn owl is of special concern in Massachusetts it means the number of barn owls isn't that great compared to the land area that we have in Massachusetts.

Go back to Species.
Go back to Owls.