Flammulated owls really get around

My old pal from Sisters Country Conrad Weiler and his dear wife, Joan, hit me with a wonderful surprise a week or so back. They sent me an email from Panama.

There's ol' Conrad, standing in the bow of a ship carrying him and his lovely wife through the Mira Florues Lock, just before they went on a tour of the Gamboa National Forest.

As I sat in front of my faithful old MacBook OS10 reading the mail and wishing I were there with them, the name Gamboa went bouncing through my ancient brain and with it came an image of Rebecca Goggins, Forest Service researcher.

Through banding baby flammulated owls, Rebecca and other researchers discovered the owls spend their winters in Panama, principally in the Gamboa National Forest.

Then up popped Jane Stevens, retired wildlife rehabber living in Sisters with her husband, Bill. Jane was holding a baby flam that a wood-cutter presented to her. He found it in a tree cavity in a dead lodgepole he felled for firewood near Lava Top Butte, on the east side of Hwy. 97.

The little flammulated's a ringer for the Western screech owl, but has jet-black eyes. Screech owls have yellow eyes. While screeches live on small rodents, flams don't give a hoot about mammals; they live on moths, beetles and crickets.

Dead trees, especially snags, carry a red flag for firefighters, but they also have "Home" written all over them for woodpeckers, small birds and even bats. When snags are removed from the forest without consideration as essential wildlife habitat, that creates serious problems for cavity nesters.

When an area with lots of bug- or fire-killed trees is opened for wood-cutting it should be inventoried for wildlife trees (trees with cavities already in them) and those trees marked as wildlife trees. It also becomes the responsibility of the wood-cutter to look over each tree he wishes to cut to ensure it isn't already keeping someone else warm and cuddly.

Reliving those wonderful days working with Jane and the USFS on owls and wildlife habitat I began to laugh, then laugh even harder as more memories came flooding back, and at that point my wife, Sue, became alarmed and came into my office to see what was going on... "Do you remember the day OSP called me and asked if I would fly the baby flams Jane was caring for back to La Grande...?" I said. Then Sue started to laugh...

It seems a different woodcutter in La Grande took the baby flams from a nesting cavity near where he was cutting wood, and brought them home, but his neighbor turned him in for stealing them from Mother Nature. OSP cited him, took the baby owls away from him, then formed a patrol car relay and sent them overland to rehabber Jane Stevens in Bend.

Then the next day, Rebecca Goggins, the researcher who was studying the owls found them missing and called OSP. They realized what they'd done and told her not to worry, they'd get them right back. OSP then called me and I ran over to Jane's, grabbed up the owls, and headed for the airport. I called my young friend Jeff Cooney, who was studying to be a wildlife veterinarian to see if he'd like to go along.

I contacted a pal who owned a lovely little Aeronca Chief airplane I loved to fly, and Jeff, the two baby flams, and I took off for La Grande. Rebecca met us at the airport and she and Jeff whisked the babies back to their tree cavity home where they were accepted by their parents.

Little did the parents realize the Great Adventure the two nestlings had been on in less than 24 hours. A 150-mile relay in patrol cars, then to a wildlife rehabber, then packed off into a noisy airplane for another 150-mile trip back home and waiting parents. Who says owls don't give a hoot...