A Busy Evening

This has been a busy evening in a number of ways. After her evening break, Mrs. Owl returned with a gecko (photo 1). She began to feed it to the owlets. Merely 2 minutes into this process, Mr. Owl arrived with a lizard. He expected his usual reception, which is for Mrs. Owl to reach up to the doorway and grab it from him. However, her mouth was full of gecko, so he came down into the box. A lot of confusion resulted, in which he tried to hand it to her, as the owlet heads bobbed up and down in anticipation of all this lovely food. (photo 2). As he could get nobody to take his offering (the owlets being too small to grab a whole lizard), he left after about a minute (photo 3).



The next chapter of this unusual evening involved a fair bit of worry on our part. After Mr. Owl left, we heard a Barred Owl call in the back yard. Barred Owls are much bigger owls that eat, among other things, Screech Owls. There have been a pair of Barred Owls in our neighborhood since last summer, and on occasional nights during the last few months, we have heard their "YOOOOU-aaaall" or the full "Who cooks for you, who cooks for YOOOOU-aaaall?" song. We have been concerned that they might prevent or interrupt the Screech Owl nesting by eating one or both of the parents.
So after hearing the Barred Owl call tonight, we didn't see Mr. Owl for nearly 2 hours. During this time, Mrs. Owl went out several times, sometimes for as long as 23 minutes, and returned with food each time. We began to get concerned that perhaps something had happened to Mr. Owl, and she was being forced to hunt for the owlets' dinner. We began to speculate on what we would do if he did disappear, when he finally showed up with a food delivery. It turns out we missed a couple of deliveries that were recorded on the camera frame captures on the computer. But he was absent for over an hour, and Mrs. Owl's hunting behavior was unusual. Our conclusion is that it was a rather warm night (still over 70 degrees at midnight), and that perhaps she didn't need to incubate the owlets all the time. Perhaps she decided she might as well join the hunting effort. That or a bit of cabin fever.