IN THE DARK

Scientists know relatively little about the Whiskered Screech-Owl, so a team from HawkWatch International is working to understand its population size, range, and more

CHARLES BERGMAN

Let’s start with her astonishing eyes. They were huge. If human eyes were as large in our faces, relatively, we’d have eyes the size of large lemons. The yellow of her eyes was so intense, they seemed to glow, electric and incandescent. They were the only splash of color on her gray, well-camouflaged body. I held her legs between my fingers and lifted her to my face, eye-to-eye with a Whiskered Screech-Owl, one of the least-studied and most mysterious of all 19 owl species in the United States. I had joined David Oleyar, a raptor biologist with HawkWatch International, and his research team in the Chiricahua Mountains in southeastern Arizona, where he conducts what may be the only systematic study that includes the species. “It’s one of the groups of…

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BirdWatching (Digital) - 1 Issue, May/June 2023

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