Molly the Barn Owl - comments on events of late March

I was recently introduced to a wild mama raising her babies in a nesting box in San Marcos. The live stream watching her (WITH SOUND! So you can hear all the sweet and expressive chirps, begging sounds, and love sounds between Molly and mate McGee), is 24 hours a day. Wow!

The website is:
www.ustream.tv/theowlbox

I've gone on the chat room a few times and we've been talking about some of her unusual behaviors. For example, there have been many, many studies about Barn Owls' diets, with the overwhelming consensus being that they eat about 97% mice/voles with another 2-3% being small birds or other opportunistically captured small animals. But THIS hunter, McGee, is bringing home RABBITS! Consistently, I'm told! I'm floored. This just shows that each owl is an individual and that no matter how much of an expert a person is, they will never know everything. That's what I love about science, and about ethology in particular!

Each animal within a species is an individual. Wesley wanted to be a water bird. Never mind that he wasn't waterproof and that in the wild he could have died from not being able to fly when wet, or from hypothermia. In captivity, he was able to realize his dream of living like a heron because of the technology available to him (me lifting his waterlogged self out of the tub, drying him off, and using the blow dryer).

And McGee is an individual. He has apparently NOT read the literature and has decided to hunt small rabbits, which he brings home to his family. This makes me wonder if there is a subgroup in the San Diego area of barn owls that rely heavily on rabbits because of their abundance - a group that has adapted to eating rabbits. It may not just be McGee, in other words.

This would be very interesting to look in to. Pellets from all over the United States are dissected by schoolchildren to show them how scientists find out about the diet of wild animals (other than just through observation). As I understand it, they invariably find a mouse skeleton in the pellet, certainly not a rabbit skeleton!

Yet here we have it - hard evidence that a barn owl is hunting rabbits for his family. They seem to be young rabbits - not full grown - but still, this is a big change from the normal behavior of Barn Owls. I would love to see a study of local barn owl pellets to see if the whole local community in that area are eating rabbits. I assume that McGee learned to hunt from his parents. This is how all barn owls learn to hunt. They go with their parents and watch them hunt, plus they learn what to see as food by what their father brings to them in the nest.

If the local community of owls is eating rabbits, then McGee would have learned that from his father/parents.

One thing that is so wonderful about this site and chatroom is that we have many thousands of people doing exactly what ethologists DO, which is carefully and consistently watching the wild behavior of an animal and then asking the myriad of questions that come up. And the questions will be endless, each branching almost infinitely into the next. The answers start to come with experience and with a lot of patient watching. But to someone who is truly fascinated, it doesn't seem like you need patience, does it? The time just flies by and you become more and more interested and curious as you have more and more questions about what you're seeing.

That's just what it's like to be an ethologist, and it's a blast to have thousands of people being ethologists and naturalists and truly being able to experience it! WOW!

An ethologist is someone who studies the behavior of wild animals through observation of them in the wild, or in some cases, doing immersion studies like i did w/ Wesley. Konrad Lorenz is considered the "father of ethology". He did a famous immersion study with Graylag Geese, allowing them to imprint on him. He stayed with them and studied them and was their "parent" as far as they were concerned. He even had to teach them to fly.

I did a similar study with Wesley, having gotten him before his eyes opened. When they did open, he imprinted on me and I was his "mother" and later his "mate", so that he behaved toward me the way an owl mate would behave toward his female. In fact, Wesley routinely greeted me in the bonding behavior that we're seeing with McGee. When McGee goes into the nest he often jumps on her back and does what can look like a mating behavior, but which is really a greeting.

Many animals use aspects of their courtship behaviors as a greeting, including humans. We hug and kiss to greet each other and it's not at all sexual. Same goes for McGee rebonding w/ Molly whenever he comes in with food for her.

If you're watching the stream, feel free to ask questions on the comment section of my blog, and I'll discuss them in the next blog. I want to be able to slow down from the chat room and really have questions and discussions here on this blog, for those who are interested. This is a once in a lifetime opportunity for all of us to do an informal field study of a nesting pair of barn owls! How exciting!

I used to spend many, many nights out somewhere under a nest and watching the owls. It's so fun to be doing this WITH you guys who are so into it! How amazing it is for me to discover so many kindred spirits who are so interested in these barn owls, just like I have been all of my adult life!

I'm going to go over to the stream now and watch the owls!

Sincerely,
Stacey O'Brien

PS People asked me about an incident involving Molly taking a rabbit outside, then McGee bringing it back in. I watched the video long enough to see that Molly took it out and to hear that she was eating on it. If you watch carefully, you'll see that sometimes Molly will hold a piece of food in her mouth up and away from the babies while making a stacatto sound that's very distinctive and goes up in pitch and volume, sort of like: du du du Du Du DU DU DU DU DU DU DU DU Du Du Du du du du...

That sound specifically means, "This morsel tastes SOOO good! I love this stuff! I want to swallow it but first I'm celebrating how wonderful it tastes!"

Even though she sometimes still feeds the morsel to an insistent baby after making that sound, she sometimes does swallow the morsel. Wesley did this when he had a particularly delicious piece in his mouth (like a head, heart, liver, or rack o' ribs).

So, with the rabbit, Molly took it outside and you can hear her making that sound intermittently, which to me means she was reaching into the neck hole and pulling out pieces then celebrating them, then swallowing them. She probably needed to get away from the babies in order to eat in peace.

Later, when McGee "regifted" it to her, I think he found it outside, partially hollowed out, and brought it back in. That's just my opinion but it is based on experience.