Gray fox and sun
David Brown's Wildlife Services
12 Hotel Road
Warwick, MA 01378
Tel 978 544 8175
E-mail:
info@dbwildlife.com
Encounters
"Tracking is seeing. Seeing is done with the mind."



Tracking Problem:
Bird of the Month: Screech Owl

Photo D. Brown
This site was in central Massachusetts
in a mixed hardwood forest. The trail
was under a fallen branch.
  1. What genus of mammal left this
    trail?
  2. Why was the trail located under
    a branch?
  3. What gait was the animal using
    that resulted in the patterns in
    the photograph?
  4. Why was the animal using this
    atypical gait?
  5. What may have caused this
    animal to move over the snow?
Red-morph screech owl dozing in a tree hole.Viideo-still D. Brown
      Screech owls actually don't
screech. Their calls are a haunting,
quavering whistle, sometimes
descending in scale, sometimes
staying on one pitch.
     I call these cemetery owls because
they roost and nest so often in these
locations. Forestry practices typically
remove large trees before they suffer
rot in their interior and lose limbs, a
natural aging process that exposes the
hollow interior. However, this results in
a loss of roosting and nesting sites for
species, like screech owls, that
depend on tree cavities. Trees in
cemeteries, on the other hand, are
allowed to grow old beyond value, that
is, to all but the screech owl and other
species that depend upon such sites.