May 20, 2025
Several times a day and night I pop outside to check on and photograph the screech owl family nesting in our front yard. I’m obsessed. Since I first spotted them using the nesting box back in April, I’ve followed their progress with the eagerness of a new grandmother. So here I am again, insisting you look at more photos of the adorable family.
About a week ago, the female left her perch in the box opening — squeezed out by growing owlets, I assume. She and her mate roost separately in nearby trees, keeping watch over the box and hunting each evening to feed their chicks. I can always spot one of them easily, given away by a white stain of bird poop on the driveway. The other is more elusive.
Screech owl feathers look exactly like live oak bark — excellent camouflage. This one often trills in late afternoon, offering reassurance, perhaps, that dinnertime is coming soon.
Here’s what that sounds like.
A few days ago I craned my neck under the tree — and a pair of curious eyes were staring back at me from a fuzzy, gray face. An owlet!
The owlet can flutter from branch to branch, but I don’t think it can properly fly. Yet it’s in a separate tree from the owl box and just as high. How? I suspect it accidentally launched one evening, fluttered to the ground, and climbed up using its strong talons and beak. And now here it sits next to mom or dad.
One of the great horned owlets at the Wildflower Center also accidentally left its nest this week, if you’ve been following their adventures on the Cornell owl cam. Owls are made for this sort of thing — no worries.
Mom and dad are still watching over their baby and feeding it in the tree.
More fun for me — two owls to watch overhead
The world is an exciting place for a young owlet freed from its nest: windy days with bouncing perches, people coming and going below, bugs and lizards to practice hunting on.
It’s enough to tucker you out.
Mom or dad giving me an owly gaze.
Here they both are — baby is on the right
And here they are later, resting up for their nightly activity.
I knew another owlet (or more) was still in the box because the parents make multiple food deliveries each evening, setting off a scrabbling noise within the box. Finally another owlet showed itself in the opening. Hello there!
What must it think about me, this strange tall creature standing at all hours with a long lens camera or my cell phone pointed at it?
Neighbors were having their trees trimmed yesterday, and I wondered if they might have had an owl family — or other nesting birds — in their oaks. Better to wait on that sort of work until after nesting season, I feel — especially for live oaks, which are vulnerable to contracting oak wilt if pruned out of season.
Mealtime!
Junior in the tree gets a snack delivery too.
Eager for more in the owl box — and look, a third owlet!
No wonder the parents have been so busy each evening, swooping back and forth with prey. That’s a lot of mouths to feed.
We’ve had three screech owlets before. I wonder if there could be a fourth this time? I’ll be out there looking any minute now.
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