Working an earlier than usual shift at work got me home with just enough daylight left to run over to Heckscher State Park (Suffolk Co.) to try for migrating Nighthawks. But if any were on the move this evening, none passed through the swath of sky I watched, only a few bats. But I did not get shut out on birds entirely. As I neared my car (parked on Old Schoolhouse Road) I heard the soft "whinny" call of an Eastern Screech Owl from the well-wooded yard of a residence across the street. It was soon answered by at least two different birds not far inside the park boundary. The owls went back and forth for a few minutes with some short lulls. My barely passable whinny imitation may have done the trick, or maybe it was just coincidence, but eventually one owl flew into a tree just inside the park fence. A streetlight up the block provided just enough illumination to help make out the bird's shaggy silhouette and some faint details, but I wished I¹d had a flashlight in my car. These birds were among the very few Screech Owls I¹ve encountered without playback of recordings, mostly during the frigid pre-dawn hours of Christmas counts, so finding some without trying on a balmy late summer evening was a very pleasant surprise.
-- NYSbirds-L List Info: http://www.NortheastBirding.com/NYSbirdsWELCOME http://www.NortheastBirding.com/NYSbirdsRULES http://www.NortheastBirding.com/NYSbirdsSubscribeConfigurationLeave.htm ARCHIVES: 1) http://www.mail-archive.com/nysbirds-l@cornell.edu/maillist.html 2) http://www.surfbirds.com/birdingmail/Group/NYSBirds-L 3) http://birdingonthe.net/mailinglists/NYSB.html Please submit your observations to eBird: http://ebird.org/content/ebird/ --
