Prowling for Owls at Klamath Marsh NWR

In February we headed south to Klamath Falls for our second annual trip to the Winter Wings Festival. We were looking forward to revisiting all the hotspots that had treated us so well on our last visit, but the main reason we wanted to get back was the overnight owl prowl we booked in hopes of finding a Great Gray Owl.

Black-crowned Night-Heron

Night-heron roost. There were dozens in just these couple of trees, and none anywhere else in town.

We met up with guides Harry and Kevin in the afternoon, along with our celebrity tagalong, James Currie. Currie was in town as the festival's keynote, but he was also filming an episode of his show Birding Adventures TV, with his trusty cameraman Jeff trying to capture footage of his "golden bird" (new episodes air on Destination America, but older episodes are available here).

James Currie

We would spend the night in a bungalow at the Klamath Marsh NWR headquarters. This was the same day the armed occupation of Malheur NWR finally ended, and we want to give credit here to USFWS who were prepared for the worst, not least because the refuge lies along one of the main routes to Burns, OR. By all accounts, the field trip was touch-and-go for a while, and you can bet that we would have been devastated had our plans been scuppered by a bunch of militant scumbags.

Our target: Great Gray Owl. This one was mounted in the building where we bunked for the night.

Spotted Owl wouldn't be a bad bird, either.

On our drive in to the refuge we had a steady stream of Rough-legged Hawks fly alongside the road, and perched in nearby trees. Later that night, this same road was where we'd flush half-a-dozen or more Short-eared Owls who were laying in wait for any voles foolish enough to leave snow tunnels.

Rough-legged Hawk

We haven't got any photos to share from our nocturnal prowlings, but the night started with a single toot from a Northern Pygmy-owl. A heard-only Northern Saw-whet Owl called much more persistently, but too far off to consider tracking down. And our target bird? Great Gray Owls make a repeating "woo, woo, woo" call… of which we heard only one "woo". A single woo, in fact, followed immediately by a Great Horned Owl. It all happened so fast, that we decided not to count it. When we finally do see/hear a Great Gray Owl, I want to FEEL that I was in the presence of greatness.

We were up well before dawn broke the next morning, hoping to turn up any last-minute owls while they were still active. A calling Pygmy-owl lured us into a meadow, leading to an exhausting quarter mile hike through foot-and-a-half-deep snow. We weren't able to pinpoint it, and settled for decent looks at a Clark's Nutcracker.

We didn't see any owls, but the sunrise alone was worth waking up for

On the way back into Klamath, we stopped at Collier State Park. We were all quite taken with an active pair of American Dippers that we'd missed when we checked in briefly the day before. They seemed right at home under the bridge, and someone said they saw a nest, but I don't think they ever visited it while we were there.

Williamson River runs through Collier State Park. That's the same Williamson as in Williamson's Sapsucker

Not sure what type of moth this is, but they were everywhere

American Dipper

Of course our attention broke away from the Dippers as soon as Harry called out a Northern Pygmy-owl he watched fly in across the stream. We'd already heard a couple call on this trip, but this was the first we'd seen. We were all impressed with how cooperative it was, unobstructed and out in the sunlight -- of course that was nothing compared with the one Maureen and I would find in Ashland three days later.

Northern Pygmy-owl - perhaps look for this future celebrity on a future episode of Birding Adventures?

Welcoming Waterfowl and Snowless Snowshoeing: Winter Wings Festival, Day 1

Klamath Falls is a small town near the Oregon / California border that gave us some of our first impressions of Oregon on our drive up last April. Although we'd done our birding exclusively from the car at the time, we'd still picked up great birds like Black-billed Magpie and Common Raven. We knew we'd be back someday, given its proximity to Crater Lake, and we were happy that the occasion of our return was their annual Presidents' Day weekend birding festival a couple of weeks ago, Winter Wings.

Ruddy Duck

Common Merganser

This merganser was either practicing to be a bittern...

… or a rock star

This was only the second birding festival we'd attended, and it was considerably smaller than Florida's massive Space Coast Birding and Wildlife Festival. Even so, there were some great events scheduled, and the Klamath Basin is a helluva playground. We had one trip booked for our first day, but we started off our morning at lake in town at Veterans Park, just the two of us. Right away, we knew we were going to have a fantastic weekend. We got excited at the very first Common Goldeneye, which we can find in small numbers along the coast where we regularly visit, but not as close as this. Another popped up right beside it -- a female. Then another -- a first-winter male. Then another and another.

Common Goldeneye

1st winter male Common Goldeneye

Nicely illustrating the three plumages shown in Sibley. Why can't all birds do that?

Overhead, 15 or so Black-crowned Night-herons were either coming from or going to their roost site. It had been so long since we'd even seen one, so a whole flock at once was a real treat. We crossed the road, leaving the park, and hit the night-heron jackpot: their roosting site, right in someone's backyard (oh, to be so lucky) housing at least 50, and probably more. Not only that, but lots more Goldeneyes… BOTH kinds! Barrow's Goldeneyes were our first of several lifers this trip, and we saw enough of them to forever put us past our anxiety of figuring out which Goldeneye is which (I hope).

Black-crowned Night-heron

Barrow's Goldeneye

Male and female Barrow's

As for the field trip, unfortunately it largely fell casualty to our uncharacteristically mild winter. This was billed as a snowshoeing hike, with an emphasis on identifying wildlife tracks, but instead of the anticipated 3' of snow they usually enjoy, we had to settle for tramping around in the mud. It was still fun, but we'd been looking forward to snowshoeing, which would have been new for us. There were plenty of scat, bones, and hoof prints along the way, although the only mammal we actually saw was a lone coyote tracking across a field. One other notable find was a swarm of Thatch Ants that Maureen spotted. These ants can apparently construct impressively huge mounds of plant material, which we didn't manage to come across.

Mt. McLaughlin

Coyote

Lichen-covered snag

I forget which ungulate this belonged to. I want to say Elk

Thatch Ant

On the way to the snowshoeing / not-snowshoeing trip, we'd passed a lake that seemed to have hundreds, if not thousands, of Tundra Swans. We filed it in the back of our minds for future use, and headed straight there once we left the return bus. Besides swans, Upper Klamath Lake was chockablock with Northern Pintails, Greater White-fronted Geese, and assorted other waterfowl. Maureen somehow managed to find a Eurasian Wigeon. I picked out a swan from the multitudes that looked bigger than the surrounding Tundras, with no yellow on the lores, that I tentatively called a Trumpeter. So far nobody's contradicted us, but feel free shatter our illusions if you see fit.

With 10 Bald Eagles patrolling the premises, its no wonder the waterfowl were jittery

Tundra Swans and Greater White-fronted Geese

Trumpeter Swan (back left) with Tundra Swans

The #1 field trip we wanted to attend at the festival was the Klamath Falls Owl Prowl. Oregon has everything from Great Gray Owl, to Northern Pygmy, Northern Saw-whet, Spotted, Flammulated… The only owls we've managed to see here in the past 9 months are species that are common enough back East (Barred and Burrowing Owls), so we were hungry for something new, and this would have been our best shot for rounding up a whole bunch of Oregon's owls in one fell swoop. Even though we registered for the festival on only the second day, the trip had already maxed out. This was a bummer, obviously, but we managed to get the inside scoop on exactly where the trip had been successful a night earlier, and we decided to head there ourselves.

Astoundingly, we'd neglected to bring a flashlight with us, so tracking one down was our first priority. Next, the drive from Klamath Falls to Klamath Marsh NWR was unexpectedly long, and we were getting nervous, since we had no assurance that we weren't going to run into any locked gates or No-Trespassing-After-Hours signs. Fortunately, neither difficulty manifested, and we took the long, straight Silver Lake Rd. into the refuge. Along the way, our car flushed a large bird from the side of the road while we drove, which took off across the dike, and over the marsh. My first throughout was night-heron, but as Maureen expertly got the light on it, we knew we had a Short-eared Owl. We'd flush three more on the way to the refuge. Try as we might, we never turned up any other species once we got to the refuge, but for us, we were happy to count our owl excursion an unqualified success!