Thursday, February 10, 2011

He did it again!

Rusty's persistence has paid off! Every night once or twice Rusty flies over to Iris' perch by the hatch and does some low, sexy hoots. Iris always meets him with hisses. And when he isn't hooting to her, he offers her food, which she often has refused. Of course it might help if Rusty offered the food BEFORE Iris had her own supper....

At any rate, just after 2 AM this morning Rusty tried his best hoots on Iris. Although she hissed, he hopped over on top of her and apparently copulated! Woo-hoo!

Maybe there's hope for a Valentine's Day egg....

4 comments:

  1. Since I know that you are interested in owl vocalizations, I wondered if you heard the very melodic twittering tonight. The cam was offline ( sometime after 9pm) so I couldn't see who was singing. Maybe Iris- way too high for the manly Rusty - or a canary! MapleOwl

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  2. Iris and Rusty both do the high pitched twittering or chitters. Depending on the context they can be nice sounding or agitated sounding. If I heard them, I just considered them appropriate for the context and didn't make a special note of them.

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  3. Both were next to each other on the far perch, and Iris was chittering. But could not make out if he fed her, or what.

    7:35PM Central time

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  4. Good catch! Rusty tried to feed Iris but she refused, since she had already eaten. If you listen very closely when he tries to feed her you'll hear him make soft little grunty sounds.

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