Owl Takes Off
Sunday morning is usually busy in the park, and almost everyone who passed wanted to see the owl. The visitors were a mix of park regulars and nearby residents who read about the owl in the New York Times on Thursday. As in previous days, the owl paid almost zero attention to the throng of human admirers. I know that this sounds improbable to some birders. Here in the video above is a more or less random minute of the owl’s behavior as groups of people were yakking it up on the path. I could post 20 more minutes of the same thing. The owl very rarely glanced in the direction of its observers. Even the barking of a dog safely on leash among the people did not alarm the bird.
From this morning’s footage I made a second video that’s probably more interesting than watching the owl pay no attention to talking people. In this video below, the owl preens, shakes itself, yawns, does something like sneezing, and at the end, takes off. This was at 10:09 a.m. As the video shows, there did not seem to be anything to alarm the owl at the moment. It flew low in a northerly direction. It did not settle in its more northerly spot at Perch A. I scanned the whole eastern shore of the area and did not see the bird. Whether it just took a short break somewhere or whether it began its northward migration remains to be seen. If you saw it somewhere on Sunday afternoon please text or call 510-717-2414 and report it. Thank you. We’ll be looking for it Monday morning.
Your photos are getting more and more fantastic…..thank you