Hi Everyone,
-- I have a very sad post to write, in fact it has taken me over a week to do it. I have been taking photos of many Snowy Owls this winter from Portland to southern Mass.
As you all know and appreciate the fact that we have been blessed with an abundance of these beautiful birds all over our coastline and beyond. I have acquired a special
fondness for one of these owls that has been seen by me and many other bird lovers at Parsons Beach in Kennebunk. The owl has been there almost daily for the past two months.
It has been seen in the marsh, on top of driftwood, on top of different telephone poles and even to the delight of many birders, sitting in plan view in a lone scrub pine tree on the side
of the road. One late afternoon I got a call from a birdwatcher friend of mine, that he saw the owl in the field and it was unable to hold it's head up. I drove over there as fast as I could
but when I got there it had just died. I felt terrible. I picked it up and it was just feathers and bones. To me it obviously starved to death. I felt around it's breast bone and there was no meat on it at all. I took it to the Rachel Carson Wildlife Center Headquarters in Wells and gave it to the Marine Biologist there and two of the biologist on duty checked it and did
agree that it did indeed die from starvation.
It only go's to prove that the outward appearance of these beautiful owls does not tell us of the health status of their condition. I have been told by Norm Smith, a Snowy Owl
researcher and expert of 32 years in the field of owl studies, has said that almost always the owls we see around here are first year owls from the Arctic. That means that they
are only 6 to 7 months old when they first start arriving in the fall. They have traveled so far and when they get here they are are in desperate need to eat and regain weight
and strength to return in the spring. As most of you know, they were raised on Lemmings since birth, so rodents are their main diet. The problem this year in Maine has been
the deep snow cover we have had all winter long which has only recently been melting down, so the opportunity for the owls to find rodents has been extremely difficult. For some of the Snowy Owls, at least the ones that have the strength and courage to attack and kill ducks will probably do well and survive the winter here. Some of the owls do not go after the ducks for one reason or another because the owl that I am talking about that has been at Parsons Beach, had opportunities every day all winter to try for a duck but never did and
there was always ducks present there, in the tidal river and in the marsh. There was always Black ducks, Mallards and Canadian Geese to try for but it didn't.
I miss that owl. I went to Parsons Beach almost every day just to see it and photograph it. You can see photos of it that I took just three weeks ago. I have many of them but I
only have posted four of them on my flickr account. They are the first 4 images.
Ken DiBiccari
https://www.flickr.com/photos/ken_dibiccari-nature_images/
Maine birds mailing list
maine-birds@googlegroups.com
http://groups.google.com/group/maine-birds
https://sites.google.com/site/birding207
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Maine birds" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to maine-birds+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
0 comments:
Post a Comment