Apparently my cabin is the territorial dividing line between two pairs of Barred Owls. Via my Birdnet-Pi I had learned the owls were present. However nothing prepared me for what happened at 4 am. Via the light of the full moon in the Boreal forest of northern Minnesota, two pairs of Barred Owls at first just hooted like crazy directly over where I was standing (two locations 100 yards apart). I then noticed the shadow of one owl flying and it went straight to the location of the other pair. This started 15 minutes of the most crazy hooting with short flights directly at each other. I was outside for 30 minutes, but my BirdNET-Pi shows this hoot fest fight went on for almost two hours.
After coming back inside the cabin I did research via Cornell’s Birds of the World. I wanted to confirm that Barred Owl couples actual fight, and the answer is definitely yes … and much more during mating / nesting season. As a f.y.i. my cabin is way north in Minnesota, and ice out on the lake was only 7 days ago. It is unlikely that the Barred Owls have nested yet, or if they have … only within the past few days.
It was an amazing experience!!!
- Link to my post about BirdNET-Pi and how to build / configure a unit
- Birdsong Listening Stations in NE Minnesota
Here is a screenshot I took from of my BirdNET-Pi shortly before 5 am. You will note the box ID’d the owls 429 times during the hoot fight fest. I do have a 15 minute audio file from the experience. I was dumbfounded when I first went outside around 4 am. I was hoping to track a single owl, but as the calls kept coming from different locations, I started to realize something special was happening.
Pre-Dawn Over Northstar Lake … Hudson Bay Watershed in Northern Minnesota. Image taken around 5:30 am this morning … 40 minutes before sunrise and about 50 minutes after the Barred Owl “hootfest” ended at 4:40 am. The Owls were still occasionally calling but the fight was over.
