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A Bird or Fox?

Winter 2004-2005 Newsletter

Late last spring we put up an owl box about ten feet high in an oak tree in our backyard. It stood empty all summer and we finally forgot about it.

Then one day in November Chuck happened to be looking out the window and lo and behold, a little head was poking out of the box. Putting the scope on it, we decided it looked like a little red fox.

Well, we knew a fox couldn’t climb up a tree, so we looked through our bird book and identified it as a screech owl. Every afternoon at 3:30 it would poke its head out, look around sleepily and finally, about an hour later, hop out onto a branch and fly away. Sometimes it would disappear for a few days, then come back for awhile (never when we had people here we wanted to show it to!) and then disappear again.

Later, biologist/ornithologist Keith Blackmore informed us that foxes, even red foxes, can indeed climb trees. We assured him that we had seen the owl on the branch and that it was, without doubt, a bird.

We learned that screech owls come in several colors, including gray and brown. Their voices, which we have heard a few times at night, are eerie and sound like a lonely ghost wailing in a high, fluttery squeal.

—Pat Wemstrom