Clare and I took some time off from doing all the necessary admin while we’re at home, to take a brief road trip with our friend Rob to Lafayette today, and meet a kind gentleman who gave us a tour of his amazing property so we could make the acquaintance of a few of the Owls residing therein. Now when I say ‘amazing’, I mean it! As soon as we arrived he had us hop on the back of his Gator (look it up), and we began winding our way through more habitats than I could have imagined he had hiding there. He was incredibly knowledgeable, telling us all about the various plants, trees, birds, mammals, amphibians, you-name-it, that called his land ‘home’, and bunches of stories about them… it was really a great time on a cold and rainy February day.

At one point Clare and I got to talking about how much we’d love to know all of this stuff. How we’d like to point out mosses and ferns along the way, recite their Latin names, and explain why it’s so special that they’re there. Don’t get me wrong, Clare is brilliant, and I have my moments, but we realize that learning more parts of the ecology of the areas we’ll be exploring this year could benefit us greatly. SOOOOOOO, that goes on the ‘to-do’ list.. Maybe we can split that job. Clare can take the trees and shrubs, and I’ll take the reeds and grass. (I’ll leave the salamanders to her, we saw a couple today and she thought they were cute)

So on route to see the Saw-whet Owl, we passed three Barred Owls, one of which was being very camera friendly…

'You didn't come to see me?! Move along..'

We stopped briefly at another spot where a Saw-whet was snoozing away, but buried deep within the branches it was roosting in. We got a peek, but was told there was another not far away. After we went a little further along the twisting trail, we climbed out of the Gator and walked a short way to the Owl of the hour..

Now this guy was a lifer for both Clare and I, and just as adorable as every picture I’d seen. I love watching the way Clare can stare forever at them, whether they’re lifers or birds she’s seen a hundred times before.. She truly has a love for this, and I think it’s catchy. In the subtitle of this blog I refer to myself as a ‘birder-in-training’ but when I watch Clare, I feel more like a person inspired to bird the way she does… even when I make beginner mistakes (I’ll get to that later). So we got face-to-face with this owl. He wasn’t bothered by us, or by the cameras, so we captured the moment…

'Saw-whet are you looking at??' Sorry I can't resist these puns. I'm done now.

After we hung out with the owl for a while, the property owner took us exploring a little more as we all talked. We saw an accipiter that sped through a bit too quickly for any of us to get much on him, and Clare saw a lone Common Redpoll, adding that to her Indiana list, followed by my IDing several Redpolls that turned out to be pale Tree Sparrows that I was spotting from a distance.. I DID mention that I’m a ‘birder-in-training’..