After recovery, saw-whet owl to be local ambassador
Mystic — With yellow-rimmed elfin eyes and a large speckled head crowning its small body, the as yet unnamed saw-whet owl in Maggie Jones’ care is destined for a future as a local wildlife celebrity.
“They’re always everybody’s favorite,” said Jones, executive director of the Denison Pequotsepos Nature Center, as she fed the owl its breakfast Wednesday — chunks of mouse it daintily grasped in its beak from a pair of tweezers. “He’s going to be a permanent member of our owl ambassadors at the nature center.”
The center, she said, keeps two barred owls, two screech owls and a great horned owl that were injured too badly to be released, using them in educational programs at the center and at local schools and libraries. When the saw-whet owl is well enough to join them, she expects it will take the place of the last one of its species that lived at the nature center about six years ago and, owing to its diminutive size and docile nature, was always the most popular.
That saw-whet owl accidentally was released from the center, but the one that soon will take its place has been healing well but will have permanent disability in its left wing and eye.
“By spring it’ll be in the community, joining our other ambassadors,” Jones said.
The owl, which Jones estimates is about a year old, was found on a roadside in Ledyard about a month ago with a broken wing and a concussion, apparently after being hit by a car. The local resident who found the owl called the nature center, which then sent one of its staff members to pick up the bird. Jones, who is a licensed wildlife rehabilitator, has been caring for it in her home since then, keeping it in a plastic pet carrier outfitted with a perch, or sometimes on a small potted cedar tree she places near a sliding glass door with a view of the chickadees and sparrows that visit her birdfeeders.
“He’s about 3 to 3-½ ounces, about the same as a robin,” Jones said. “In the wild, they like dense coniferous forests and shrubs, and eat mice and voles and insects, but they feed mostly at night. They're very powerful for their size.”
More common in parts of the country to the north and into Canada, saw-whet owls migrate into Connecticut in the winter, and small numbers mate and have their young here, nesting in tree cavities left by woodpeckers and other birds. The state lists it as a species of special concern as a breeding population.
Patrick Comins, director of bird conservation for Audubon Connecticut, said numbers of saw-whet owls tallied on the organization’s annual Christmas bird count have ranged from the teens to the mid-50s. Nineteen were found during the count last month, he said.
“They migrate here from the north, and they tend to be an eruptive species,” with wide variations in their year-to-year numbers, Comins said.
According to some sources, the name of the species refers to the owl’s high-pitched call that resembles the sound of a saw being sharpened on a whetting stone. Jones, however, has another idea about the name.
In Quebec where they are more common, the French-speaking settlers referred to them as “chouette” — which translates as “small owl,” she said. An Anglicized version of the word, she believes, became “saw whet.” The few times the owl she’s been caring for has vocalized, she said, it’s made a “doot-doot” sound, not one reminiscent of a singing saw.
Jones plans to keep the owl at her home for another month or so, then will bring it to the nature center to join the other raptors on exhibit, giving it another month or so to adjust before starting to take it to schools and libraries. She’ll know the owl is ready for its new home, she said, when it no longer needs to be hand fed.
“He needs to be eating on his own,” she said.
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