I've been talking off and on with the Minnesota Bound folks.  It seems the camera in the tree is dead and needs to be replaced.  This is a touchy situation.  At this stage of the game, Minnie and Sota have so much invested in their kids that they won't abandon the nest if it's disturbed to put up a new camera.  That was issue number one.

The next issue was permits.  Technically putting up a new camera could be considered disturbing a nest, so the Minnesota Bound folks needed to get the blessing of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to even consider the prospect of putting up a new cam.  That was issue number two, and permission was granted.

Now for issue number three.  Due to the recent flooding, the ground around the tree is way too squishy for a boom truck.  That's how they got the camera up 75 in the tree in the first place.  The only option now is to find someone who can climb the tree (safely!) and isn't scared of Minnie potentially attacking them.  Females are bigger than males, so they take on the duty of nest protection.  According to Dr. C. Stuart Houston, who has banded over 7,000 Great Horned Owl chicks, something like 7% of all female will physically attack the tree climber.  This means that anyone attempting to climb up to a Great Horned Owl nest needs to wear a heavy leather jacket, a helmet, and goggles or a face mask.  Too many people have scars from protective mother owls, and a few have lost eyes.  No kidding.  Not to mention the risk of being knocked out of a tree while you're 75 feet up in the air....  Whoever does this HAS to know what they're doing!

So I contacted the good folks at The Raptor Center at the St. Paul campus of the University of Minnesota to see if they could recommend a tree climber.  They gave me the name and number of a man who climbs trees in heron rookeries, replaces owlets in nests when they fall out, and more.  So we've put in a call to him and hopefully we can make this all work out.  Keep your fingers crossed!

I've also put in my request for a camera with night vision and audio with the Minnesota Bound folks.  Sounds like night vision for sure, and hopefully audio.  This could be the first ever streaming Great Horned Owl cam with a day/night camera AND AUDIO!!  I'm drooling at the prospect....

Stay tuned for more details...

The back side of an owlet stretching its wings to show you how big its feathers are.

I included this goofy picture of one of the owlets stretching its wings at St. Vrain to show you just how much bigger than Bound and Determined the Colorado owlets are.  What you're looking at is the back side of an owlet while it's hunched over stretching.  You can see the wing feathers seem to be nearly half grown in.  Our little guys most certainly don't have wing feathers even starting to emerge from their sheaths yet!

Since they are much older, their mom doesn't need to stay in the nest with them like Minnie needs to stay with her owlets.  Bound and Determined aren't old enough yet to thermoregulate and maintain their own body temperature.

The Fort St. Vrain cam isn't streaming...it just offers new pictures every two minutes round the clock.  You can go back and look through the photos for the past 24 hours.  The cam is color during the day and black and white at night.  Click here to check it out!

Last night I did my annual owl survey route as part of the Western Great Lakes Owl Monitoring project.  Hawk Ridge Bird Observatory is leading this project to determine trends in owl populations in Minnesota and Wisconsin since there have never really been any good data on owl populations in the Midwest.  In this research volunteers run one (or more) pre-selected routes and listen for owls.  There are 10 stops on each route and you listen for five minutes at each site.  Before participating you have to pass a quiz on all the owl calls in Minnesota as well as questions about the survey protocol.  With a little practice anyone can learn what's needed to do it, and they provide recordings to learn from.

Since it's just passive listening and not active calling using recordings, the response rate isn't high.  Usually I hear one owl each time I do the survey (I've had both Barred and Eastern Screech-Owls.)  But this year I got skunked.  Perhaps because there was bad weather to the north and to the south, but it was clear here.  You never know what makes the owls sing or not, but either way the results are important to the study.

It's always magical to be out after dark on remote roads in the middle of the woods just standing there and listening.  In some places it's so unbelievably quiet.  Sometimes I just hear frogs--spring peepers and western chorus frogs mostly.  But sometimes in the woods I don't even hear frogs...just complete silence with the stars shining so bright above.  It forces me to slow down and just BE and enjoy the world around me.

There are routes throughout Minnesota and Wisconsin and some of them still need volunteers to adopt them.  Visit Hawk Ridge's website if you're ready to take your interest in owls to the next level and help with owl research.

When Alice eats, she stands on her food.  She pins it to the ground with her middle front talons.  She reaches down with her head, bites down on the gopher, then using her neck muscles pulls up until she tears off a piece.  Once the piece is torn off, she quickly jerks her head backwards a few times and uses her tongue to slide the meat off the tip of her beak if necessary, and down the hatch it goes.

Notice that Alice likes to eat little princess-sized bites.  (Sorry for the vertical compression on the second video...)

Owls are farsighted, just like some of you in the crowd.  They see great at a distance, but not so hot up close.  You'll notice that when Minnie is looking closely at the kids or the food she's tearing up, she actually STRETCHES HER HEAD UP as far as it will go.  The owl equivalent of holding the newspaper at arm's length.  

When they are biting into food or preening, you'll notice their eyes shut.  They can't see that great up close, so why risk injuring a valuable eye?  Instead they have rictal bristles around their bills that are very sensitive to touch (just like mouse whiskers) and they simply feel their food or the other owl they are preening.  

Cool, huh?

So what should you expect as far as feeding goes?  Expect Soda to catch the food and Minnie to feed it to Bound and Determined.  Great Horned Owls are more crepuscular that strictly nocturnal, so much of their activities will take place at dawn and especially at dusk.  I would suggest watching for feedings at those times.  They will also be fed throughout the night.  They may also be fed during the day since it takes a heck of a lot of food input to make little owlets grow into big, strong owls, but daytime isn't likely to be the main time they are fed.

Soda will likely bring more food than Minnie needs for the kids if hunting is good, so expect a gory stockpile to accumulate.  That doesn't mean the old stuff will get eaten first.  Fresh is always best!  The stockpiles are just an insurance against poor hunting--like if it rains.  (Little critters don't make nearly the noise in wet grass and leaves as they do in dry grass and leaves, nor are they as likely to be out and about.) 

Alice, my Great Horned Owl, often caches her leftover gopher parts (especially the heads, since those are the choice cut according to Alice.)  But she only eats her caches if more food isn't forthcoming in a timely manner.  Fresh is best!

When they are tiny, Minnie will only feed the owlets meat...no bones or fur.  As they get a little older (maybe even now??) she will start to give them fur and bones.  Those little owlets need calcium to grow strong bones!  Once they start getting fur and bones they will start casting (throwing up) pellets.  To keep the nest clean, Minnie will eat the pellets (and I think she even eats the poop too.)  Later when she flies off to take her break, she'll throw up her pellet (which should contain the pellets of the kids).  That being said, I haven't had the chance to witness this stuff personally, so let me know if you see it on this video feed!

Don't worry about Soda being absent from the nest.  It's not in his job description to do nest duty.  He's just chief hunter, and that's a big job with a growing family like this. 

I'm looking forward to learning a lot from Minnie, Soda, Bound and Determined!

Hey, hey, the gang's all here!!  Today is the day we've all been waiting for: our first glimpse of the kids!  After many hours of watching we can officially say we've got TWO wonderful little fuzzy bobble-headed owls tucked safely under Mom.  So it seems only fitting that today is the day the owls are officially named.

There were a plethora of great suggestions from funny to serious to sentimental and more thanks to your creative minds.  There were a few very clever ones that I had to think about for quite a while, but the names that stuck best for me for Mom and Dad are MINNIE and SODA.  (Thanks to Laura Evans for suggesting "Minnie" and "Sota" in honor of our great state of Minnesota...I just adjusted Dad's name to make it a word that might be easier for everyone to remember.)

Time for names for the kids too, now that we know both are alive and squirming away under Minnie right now.  Again there were several really clever suggestions to sort through, but tonight while watching the owl family the answer came to me clear as a bell out of the blue: BOUND and DETERMINED.  This is to honor the "MINNIESODA" BOUND staff who were so DETERMINED to get this cam back online for all of us to enjoy!  I wanted to name the whole family in honor of their efforts because without them none of us would be able to have this incredible window into the life of a Great Horned Owl family.  Thanks guys (and gals)!!!

If you watched tonight you noticed that one owlet was much squirmier and active than the other owlet.  I think it's a safe bet that this owlet is the older one.  Since one egg was laid two days before the other, it should have also hatched two days before the other.  I'd like to call the bigger owlet "Determined" and the younger one "Bound."

Minnie spent a large part of the day fussing with the kids and preening them and, lucky me, I missed the feeding.  Thanks a ton to lasher for capturing the video of it for us to watch here.  I did, however, see Soda fly in and land on a branch at the 10:00 position about 7:20 PM this evening.  Minnie paid him no attention and after a few minutes he put both feet close together and bent his head down to his feet.  I assume he was making a food delivery that was unneeded, so he just ate it himself before eventually flying away again.

Dad's on a branch on the left at the 10:00 position. Thanks to Cathy for catching this photo of Soda eating the unneeded food.

We'll surely have a lot more action in the coming 5-7 weeks before they fly the coop.  Be sure to stayed tuned for more awesome owl antics starring Minnie, Soda, Bound, and Determined!

Mitch from Minnesota Bound posted in the chat room that he saw owlets in the nest this morning.  I first checked on her about 9 AM and saw she was sitting upright but fussing around underneath herself quite a bit.  And within just a few minutes I saw a white, fuzzy, wobbly head just poke out from under her tummy feathers!  I thought I could even see the white egg tooth on the black beak yet, but maybe it was my imagination.  Then I saw her back up and rearrange herself and saw a white fuzzy blob right between her feet.  I couldn't tell if it was one or two owlets, but there is one for sure!

There appears to be extra food lying around the edge of the nest and that's great!  It means Dad is finding good hunting and that there should be plenty to feed the growing family.  Those little owlets grow fast and eat like crazy, so when they're about three weeks old they eat the equivalent of about 12 mice a day EACH, so Dad has his work cut out for him.  Best to get ahead while he can.  Plus rain makes hunting more difficult (wet leaves don't make as much noise when little critters rustle in them as dry leaves), so it's good to have some food in the bank for a rainy day.

So I will eagerly keep watching today and looking for a second little head tucked warmly under Mom's fluffy feathers.

But a couple of miles before we got to my brother's house we saw a head sticking up in a nice looking stick nest.  We stopped and got a look through our binoculars to find a Mama Red-tailed Hawk looking back at us.  Nice find, but it's still not an owl!!

When we got back home later in the afternoon we took a walk out in the woods.  We heard Barred Owls calling while it was still light out.  It was starting to get a little dark as we headed back to the house, but we sat down under a tree along a fence row to just listen.  If there was a Great Horned Owl nest within 100 yards or so we would hear squawking and hooting.

We sat for half an hour.  We heard Barred Owls, Wild Turkeys, and even a couple of American Woodcock displaying.  But no owls.  It was still a nice way to spend the evening, even if walking back home through a plowed field was tough going in the dark.

We'll keep looking....

Keep in mind that having web cams on Great Horned Owl nests involves a lot of luck, so I don't think there are any other live-action Great Horned Owl cams anywhere on the net at the moment!

I hope you all have an egg-ceptional Easter!