The squirrels are fat and fearless. The bunnies hop about freely. The neighbourhood cats are nonchalant and entitled, as cats are.
But Nature Boy — ah, Nature Boy is sad.
A year ago, we were enjoying a pair of great horned owls’ nocturnal mating duets. From November until March, when this pair laid their eggs, they hooted and cooed every night and sometimes during the day.
Their haunting calls resumed in the summer, punctuated by their offspring’s piercing shrieks.
It was the second winter the pair had nested in the park near our house.
And, it seems, it might also have been the last.
We last heard the pair at the start of the winter holiday deep freeze.
The regular evensong of “Yoo-Hoo! Who? Whoo-oo-oo” has been replaced by Nature Boy’s own quiet lament for the loss: “Boo-hoo. Hoo-hoo-oo-oo.”
Did December’s cold snap kill our feathered friends? Although temperatures dipped and troughed here on the south Island, they were nothing like the bone-cracking cold experienced in the Interior.
Even large, fluffy owls made soft by the wet coast lifestyle should have been able to withstand a couple of weeks of -10 C. They’re less bulky than their layers of feathers make them appear, but those feathers provide great insulation that allows the owls to overwinter even in the Interior in most years.
Did the snow discourage them? Since they’re on the largish size — one to two kilograms, with a wingspan of about one to 1.5 metres — snow rarely deters great horned owls. Indeed, with their excellent owlish hearing, they can hear and pinpoint tasty mice scurrying around under the snow. Mind you, if this pair had been living on the south Island for a few years, they may have become lazy winter wimps much like the rest of us.
(“I shovelled the driveway twice in one week,” Nature Boy has reminded me repeatedly since December.)
Did the cold snap chase them away? The species lives in almost all of the forested and semi-forested regions of the Americas (except the Caribbean — go figure!).
Northern great horned owl populations migrate in winter, but those that live in more temperate climes usually stick around throughout the year. They rarely move far from the area where they were born, and once they mate, they typically stay within their home territories, which range from 65 hectares up to 1,250 hectares.
That’s a large enough area that our local pair may have simply moved out of the park to take up residence in another corner of their territory, out of sight and hearing.
But it’s also possible they flew farther afield. The species is known to temporarily leave their territories to wander several hundred kilometres in fall and winter, particularly if food is scarce. Some of them even shift southward.
Or did our neighbourhood owls eat too many bad rats? More than 60 owls were found dead in the region last year — many being suspected poisonings.
In July, the B.C. government imposed an 18-month ban on rodenticides, citing secondary poisoning of owls and other animals up the food chain, including pets.
But the ban isn’t complete. Businesses that are considered essential services, licensed pest-control companies and agricultural operators are eligible for exemptions allowing them to use rodenticides or second-generation anticoagulant rodenticides.
Rodenticides are meant to kill rats, mice and other unwelcome vermin, but some don’t kill the rodents right away, allowing the mouse or rat to live another day — and be hunted and eaten by a predator. The poisons accumulate up the food chain.
Any cat, hawk, owl or other predator that catches and eats a rat with some poison in its system takes that poison into its own body. A single owl can kill up to 1,000 rodents per year. That makes for many potential poison exposures — enough to kill.
So, while Nature Boy mopes and we all feel a bit sad without those hooting wooing calls punctuating the nighttime hours, we quietly hope that our owl friends remain healthy and enjoying life somewhere near but out of hearing — or even somewhere far.
And while the owls are away, the squirrels, rabbits and cats play.
• If you find a dead owl, take a photo, collect and double-bag the bird in plastic, label it with date and location found, and put it in a freezer. Then call the B.C. Interagency Wild Bird Mortality Investigation Protocol (1-866-431-2473).
