My recent post prompted a message from Tanya Beyer, regarding a Long- eared Owl she saw in downtown Duluth today (10/24/2011):
"This owl crossed my path just after I had headed up from the lakewalk at about 8:30 a.m. Monday. I had reached the plaza above Michigan Street and was just past the monument with all the stacked hands, titled 'The Arising.' The owl, which I guessed to be a great horned at first, plunged into one of three or four spruces in the planting behind the monument. So I crept around the wall of the planting and was soon able to see the grey bulk and the perky tall horns above the eyes. The owl stayed, turning frequently to look away, then to look back and make sure the observer was no more of a threat than before. This is my second long-eared. In 1977, at the age of 17, I was so lucky as to scare one up in the pasture behind my childhood home at the edge of the Indianapolis metro area. We had a lot of thickets and pines in the overgrown farmland that surrounded us there, and in the two months that that owl stayed around, floating from one pine grove to another, it seemed the whole birding community of Indpls. got out there to view our visitor--including a whole inner city high-school natural history club." ---- Join or Leave mou-net: http://lists.umn.edu/cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=mou-net Archives: http://lists.umn.edu/archives/mou-net.html
