Late last week, we were boiling in South Texas, suffering through low-90F's temperatures with 90% humidity. Sunday, when we first stepped outside our car at a location high in the Rockies where a Boreal Owl had been reported recently, the temperature was around 19F. And falling. With snow on the ground.
After nearly an hour of standing in the frigid air, playing a recording, getting no response, and then diving back into the car to warm up, we decided to quit for the night. Darn! 50% of our Colorado nights were done, and Lady Luck still had her cold shoulder turned.
While consoling ourselves at a local brewpub, the Dillon Dam Brewery, I encountered an interesting item on the menu. If you like spicy food, you'll know that descriptions in menus often fail to live up to expectations, with dishes often being much milder than advertised. So tell me if you would have been afraid of this:
HOT!! Smoky ghost pepper cheese, hot chili sauce, fresh jalapenos and candied jalapenos.
Maybe the inclusion of ghost pepper should have scared me, but I've had other sauces with this ingredient and barely broke a sweat. Maybe I should have visualized a mound of mouth-searing jalapeƱos dwarfing the burger and gone with a salad. But, why listen to those little voices when history has proven them wrong?
When the burger arrived, it didn't look all that scary. But after a bite? Ho. Lee. Crap. It tasted great, when the fire had subsided enough for my tongue to register anything besides molten lava. Of course, I ate the whole thing, whimpering "it burns us! it burns us!" the entire time. Because like Mahatma Gandhi, I am not afraid to suffer for my cause.
Night #2 found us in on Highway 14 at Cameron Pass, Colorado, about 75 miles west of Fort Collins. Our fortunes had to change here, as eBird reports imply that you can't throw a stick without hitting a Boreal Owl (Note: I did not actually try this. No owls were harmed in the making of this blog post. That I know of.).
This HAD to be our spot, right? But those mountains are home to several other species of owl, and owls don't typically call at this time of year, so it wouldn't be easy.
At dusk, we had equipped all the hats, coats, and wool socks that had been stuffed into our suitcases, and were standing at the westernmost place on the map where an owl had been reported, with the plan of working toward Fort Collins. Using our super-cool portable Bose speaker(*), we played a few calls, but like the night before, we got no response. Second spot. Nothing. Third spot. Noth...wait, what was that?
We had heard a single sound that was like, "SKIEW!" and some clicking that sounded like a bird's bill snapping. The call came once more, but then we couldn't coax out anything else.
Hmm. Curious. As is par for the course, we hadn't deeply researched this bird aside from listening to all the calls that we had in our library, and the call we heard wasn't in the library. Could that be our owl?
We drove to the next stop, and played the song. Again, we got a "SKIEW!" back, but nothing more. And nothing at any of the other stops, before we gave up due to low temperature and high winds.
After dinner and checking into our hotel, we dug deeper into the available research, and found this blog post, which almost identically described what we heard. And we found another article that mentioned the owl does bill clicking in response to a threat. So, while we would have liked a richer experience, we're convinced we heard, twice but briefly, a Boreal Owl: bird #675 for the year!
And, fortunately, we got out of town the next morning, because then a blizzard hit.
Now, we prepare for what is likely our last big trip of the year. To where? Stay tuned...
Me
(*) The Bose Soundlink Mini speaker is awesome because it's wireless (it connects to your phone or laptop over Bluetooth), rechargeable, very portable, and it has very good sound quality. It's great for playing music in a hotel room to drown out the neighbor's TV or enticing owls to talk back to you. Highly recommended!
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