Soft purple and ivory sprays of Eastern redbud and dogwood flowers brighten the local landscape.
But there are more subtle signs of spring — nesting owls and their young.
Hiding in a tree cavity or squatting in an old hawk nest, great horned owls that tower about 2 feet tall are raising young within Pittsburgh’s city limits.
Eastern screech owls brood eggs and feed chicks on camera locally and elsewhere.
Two pairs of the diminutive owl, a 6-inch-tall raptor with big eyes, are nesting in two owl boxes with cameras in Murrysville. PixCams live webcams give the public a view of the recent hatchings and courtship behaviors such as the screech owls preening each other and feeding their new chicks.
In Pennsylvania, eight species of owl nest or regularly visit, and the National Aviary welcomed two Eurasian eagle-owl chicks earlier this spring. Staff hand-fed the two white downy puff balls.
Owl fascination
Glimpses into the secret lives of owls are a relatively new phenomenon with live webcams.
“Most people have not seen a live owl in the wild, but they know what they look like from seeing them in a zoo, on TV and in movies and logos,” said Jim Bonner, executive director of the Audubon Society of Western Pennsylvania.
They don’t look like most other birds.
“Owls have forward-facing eyes, a flat face and large eyes. We see a little of ourselves and have a different type of connection with them than other birds,” Bonner said.
Like the nocturnal magical birds shadowing the wizards in Harry Potter tales, owls have held mystical powers for millennia in literature and art.
“If you go back to the older myths, owls are associated with danger or death. The negative and mysterious connotations are due to the fact they are mostly out at night,” he said.
But it’s different now.
“There’s a proliferation of them in stories, everything from Harry Potter and figures like Tootsie Pop’s Mr. Owl. They just became a much more positive popular figure.”
An Oklahoma girl trained a webcam on a great horned owl nesting in a rectangular flower box at her home in 2010 and racked up millions of followers.
Currently, Cornell University Laboratory of Ornithology is hosting two live webcams trained on the nests of barred owls and great horned owls with young.
Screech owls in love
For decades, Bonner has watched people stop and look at Audubon’s live educational screech owl at events. “They almost always ask, ‘Is that a baby?’”
No, it’s a 6-inch-tall adult that was injured in the wild and is now an avian ambassador.
The screech owl, with its large eyes, ear tufts and a horse-like whinny song, is common locally and takes to owl boxes to roost or nest.
PixCams installed webcams in nine screech owl nesting boxes located within 30 acres of wooded property owned by PixCam founder Bill Powers.
This year, they have two pairs nesting in boxes about 150 yards apart, which is unusually close for screech owls, said Jim Kellam, an ornithologist and associate professor of biology at Saint Vincent College in Latrobe.
“We’re finding we don’t know as much about screech owls and other owls as we thought we did,” he said.
But the cameras in nesting areas are changing that.
This year, Powers has seen quite a bit of activity with several bonded pairs in the small territory.
“We’re lucky to get one pair of nesting owls and one roosting,” he said.
Powers has been monitoring the boxes for more than a dozen years. The density of nesting screech owls in his boxes reflects a good amount of food available to the owls, Kellam said.
“Bill’s home has lots of forest and patchy overgrown fields, which is ideal habitat,” he said.
Kellam watches the webcams and has seen screech owl courting behavior.
“I’m a scientist and I get so much joy from watching that stuff,” he said.
“When we go on hikes during the day in a place like Schenley Park or urban and suburban areas, we are probably passing by a screech owl in a tree cavity and we don’t know it.”
When the owl sees someone coming, it will scrunch down. With the bird's mottled feather colors, they are highly camouflaged.
Flaco the star
Many New Yorkers exalted in the adventures of Flaco, a Eurasian eagle-owl that escaped from a breach caused by a vandal at the Central Park Zoo in New York City.
He survived in the wild for a year before dying after hitting a building in February. It wasn’t just the fact that he died but the way he died.
Native Eurasian eagle-owls hunting in the wild eat a lot of rats. Flaco’s postmortem testing showed he was exposed to four anticoagulant rodenticides that are commonly used for rat control in New York City, according to Bronx Zoo veterinary pathologists. Tests also flagged severe pigeon herpesvirus from eating feral pigeons.
“These factors would have been debilitating and ultimately fatal, even without a traumatic injury, and may have predisposed him to flying into or falling from the building,” according to the Wildlife Conservation Society, which operates the Central Park Zoo and other zoos.
“He was a cultural icon in New York City, a symbol of defiance, resistance and survival — all those positive things people look for in animals and underdogs,” Bonner said.
But his death brought to light the plight of all raptors in the wild — impairment and possible death from rodenticides found in rat bait.
“Some studies show as much as 80% of owls and some other raptors have a high level of rodenticide,” Bonner said. “It might not kill them outright but will cause some problems.”
Birds of prey sit at or near the top of the food chain and bioaccumulate small amounts of chemicals from multiple things happening with rodents, he said.
“The stories of the rats in New York are legendary and lots of rat bait is put out. It’s not unexpected for the birds to eat those animals and they accumulate those toxins.”
Some rodenticides offer a lower incidence of secondary poisoning, he said.
Another danger to all owls, especially young ones in the spring, is people trying to capture them.
“If they find a young owl, don’t necessarily approach or assume it is hurt or that the parents are away,” Bonner said.
Leave the owl alone. If it becomes apparent that the bird is injured, Bonner said an owl can be transported to an animal rehabilitation shelter but cannot be kept.
Mary Ann Thomas: mthomas@post-gazette.com
First Published: April 29, 2024, 9:30 a.m.
