Two Owls at Council Grove SP

Around a week ago on February 16, we went to Council Grove State Park. It is a long drive there, so when we got out I was ready for a walk. I knew exactly where the trail was, so I ran right to it. We hadn’t hiked long before Papa said “Pileated Woodpecker“. There was a bright male on a snag not far off the trail. After a few more minutes of walking we heard a hooo-hooo hoo-hoo a Great Horned Owl. I was ecstatic to hear it hoot.

Papa and I quickly pointed in the opposite directions. Papa and I walked in the directions that were pointed in, as always, Lucy went with Papa and I went by myself. First I walked through some pine trees and then walked down the trail by the river. I saw some movement on the old fallen tree branch and when I looked through my camera it turned out to be a flicker. Then I heard a Kingfisher, I don’t really know how to describe their call but it is unique and cool to hear.  I later saw it on a standing snag, it was a male because it didn’t have an orange belly band. All of a sudden I heard an eeee-eeee-eeee. I turned around and saw two Bald Eagles mating. I was interested because I don’t usually see birds mating. I think I know where their nest is, but I don’t know for sure.I got some pictures but they were a little blurry. I kept looking over at papa to see if he saw anything but I never saw him raise his binos.

Birds mentioned in this paragraph

I saw him starting to walk back so I went over to meet him. We never heard the owl, so we met along the river to try out where we initially heard the owl. We walked the trail toward the truck still listening hard for the owl. After it didn’t call for another minute or so, we kept walking. All of a sudden it called somewhere right above us. It scared me and I nearly jumped! Another owl called a little farther away. I realized that they were dueting. Dueting is when two birds of the same species sing together like they are having a conversation. I think it was very neat hearing them duet. We circled the tree we thought the first one was in and when we didn’t see it, Papa backed up to look for it at the top. It took Papa a while to find it but he found it nonetheless. He told me to come over so I could see it and take pictures of it. Since it was a large tree, I had trouble taking pictures of it, so I asked Papa if he could try.  In the meantime I told him that I would go try looking for the other one while he tried taking pictures.

  Owl pictures

I walked around, listening, trying to find the next owl while they were still dueting. I did not find the tree it was in right away but I found it soon enough. I didn’t find the owl but I found some pellets! Since I knew that Papa loves dissecting pellets I told him that I had found the owl pellets and some of the pellets were fresh. He came over a minute later to look at the pellets and then he looked up and said “there’s the owl” and the owl was right above us! It’s funny because another time we saw an owl there, some guy showed us an owl pellet he had found and when he looked up there was the owl!