Nature Done Wright

   Today is the first day of spring, a time of great expectations.
   To my great surprise, there was an egg in the screech owl box yesterday morning, and never has one little egg looked so big.

    Click "Continue reading"… for more photos and observations.
 

    I would like to think that Mrs. Ace will have two or
three more eggs over the next 10 days — she had four eggs over that
span last year.
    But while I think that the female owl in the box is Mrs. Ace, I have know way of knowing for sure.
    By now, I have learned that the more you think you know about screech owl behavior, the more unpredictable they are.
  Screech owls do have tendencies but they seem to vary from bird to bird and year to year.
   My wife and I had a screech owl in the box last year throughout the winter.
   This year, after a few disturbances that included a run-in with an eternally pesky squirrel, no screech owl stayed in the box during February this year.
   I was so pessimistic that we’d get owls back this year that I wrote a post on March 5 entitled "Adios, Ace," but waited to post it on the blog.
   Wrong again, Owl Guy. (Thank goodness.)
   About a week or two before Mrs. Ace laid her first egg, she would return to the nesting box at night and scratch the wood chips and drum loudly for her mate.
   While I have heard the drumming before, I had never seen so much scratching since I got a case of the chiggers in Belize.
   This is the fourth year   my wife and I have hosted owls just beyond our backyard, and the one thing I know is I don’t know much.
   Below is a photo of screech-owl domestic tranquility: Mrs. Ace sitting on her egg, with a dead mole nearby for a snack.