A Visitor from Norway

Roar Solheim was the keynote speaker at the 2011 International Festival of Owls in Houston, MN. He came back to Houston in September of 2012 because he just couldn't get enough.

OK, actually he really came back to prepare owl and other specimens that I had in the freezer.  I only needed some of them for measurements, and some I had decided that realistically I wasn't going to use.  When Roar heard I was going to clean out my freezer, he asked if he could get the specimens for the Agdar Natural History Museum in Kristiansand, Norway, where he is the senior curator.

Before he came I had to negotiate a new plethora of permits I had never dealt with before to make sure I could ship the finished specimens to him.  I needed an import/export permit, a designated port exception permit so I could ship them through Minneapolis instead of Chicago, and most importantly, a CITES permit since all owls are protected by the CITES treaty.  The first two permits came in a month, while the CITES permit took four months.

Roar arrived the end of September and stayed with us for just over two weeks.  He was SERIOUS about his work because when he drove into our yard with his rental car when he first arrived, he was delighted to show us a fresh, road-killed coyote in perfect shape that he had found a few miles from our house.  So the first thing he did when he arrived, before he brought his suitcase up to his room, was skin the coyote.

Each day he got up well before us and headed in to the Houston Nature Center to work.  He stayed well into the evenings also, always coming home after me.  But then again he was here for just over two weeks and he had about eight mammals and maybe twenty birds to prepare. 

And that wasn't all he did while he was here.  He gave presentations at the Hormel Nature Center in Austin, MN and at Luther College in Decorah, IA.  He also spent a weekend with Ron and Rae Evenson (who hosted him when he was here for the Owl Festival), visiting The Raptor Center in St. Paul and Hawk Ridge in Duluth.  He spent a day birding and photographing road kill with Sue Fletcher (yes, there are weird people who do this, and obviously more than one of them!)  You've never seen a man so excited to find a road killed woodchuck.

Mind you, Roar didn't sleep much.

As I could spare the time here and there, I watch him prepare specimens.  He had a variety of different techniques that he used in different situations.  And I was flabbergasted that he washed skins with any fat on them in soap and water.  I would have thrown a skin away that looked like that!

 Roar should have been an owl beautician, because he could turn them back into owls again using a hairdryer!

  

As a thank you for giving him specimens, Roar asked if I wanted him to mount any owls for the Nature Center.  Right away I knew I wanted him to mount a beauuuuuutiful subarcticus Great Horned Owl that was found dead in the Twin Cities last Christmas.  These birds are just black and white with virtually no brown at all.  It's a subspecies that is typically found in western Manitoba and Saskatchewan. Gorgeous!

I ordered some foam for him to make a body and fake eyes from a taxidermy supply company.  They arrived in plenty of time.  Here are some of the steps of making a mounted owl.

Making the body form.

Putting wire in the wings and wrapping them.

Putting in the fake eyes.

Shoving the body back into the skin and sticking in wires.

Ready to be mounted on the perch.

Making everything look just right.

Roar has been working with owls for decades, and obviously he's starting to look and act a bit like his study subjects.  As you can see, Roar is a real hoot, in every sense of the word.  And he's VERY good at what he does, in the field and in the museum.  If you didn't know better, I'm sure you would think this was a live owl having an acupuncture treatment.  Seriously, though, his mounts are the best mounted owls I've ever seen.  They look 100% alive.  The other mount that he did of an owl snoozing on a perch, peeking over its shoulder with one eye slightly open, is often mistaken for Alice at the Nature Center.

I'm sure Roar will be back to Houston someday, and in the meantime I'll store up some more dead owls for him to mount for us.

More woodshavings and a general owl update

Since Rusty already has his nest dug down to China, I decided it was high time to add some more wood shavings to give us a chance of seeing the eggs this year.  The wood shavings are a by-products of Roger Meyer's wonderful woodwork.

Rusty and Iris have been copulating since mid-November, so they're already gearing up for breeding.

Alice is of course busy with her own nest, but is spending the bulk of her nights outside in her new patio.  She normally lays the beginning of January.

It seems Delilah has settled in with Rhett, as we heard them hooting waaaay over in Rhett's territory, where Scarlett was hooting with him last fall.  Victor continues to hoot alone.

That's the news from Houston.  Stay tuned for more exciting owl updates!

The Cam and the Door

Alice has been using her pet door to get between her room and her outdoor patio since June.  But we left the plastic flap off so she'd get used to going in and out.  It's finally too cold and we put the plastic flap on.  Would Alice push her way through?

I figured she would since she used to push open doors that weren't latched.  To make it a little easier for her we stuck a partial egg carton in the flap to prop it open.  Without a whole lot of urging she pushed her way through! But would she figure out how to come back in again?

We've used egg cartons to prop it a bit yesterday and today, and she seems to be able to do that all right.    We'll see if she manages to go in and out without propping in the next days.

The super exciting news is that we installed a new pan/tilt/zoom (PTZ) cam in the breeding cage.  Woo-hoo!  Our technological genius extraordinaire Alan Stankevitz came over yesterday to do the install (he always volunteers his time...THANKS!!!!)  Hein had previously removed a section of ceiling boards and had run an internet cable and an extension cord in the ceiling.  Ace Communications Group, our local phone company, terminated the cabled (that sounds nasty, but it means the put the jacks on the ends), as they've done for free for us since the beginning.  Hein also had mounted a 2x6 on a truss where we planned to attached the arm of the camera so only the camera dome protruded into the cage itself.

The cam itself is a little bigger than an ostrich egg and quite heavy.  We did the first work inside, then went outside and shut the door between the cages while we worked.

We opened the big eight foot door to make it easy to carry ladders in and out.  Hein first unscrewed the ceiling boards.  Then I crawled up into the ceiling to help hold the precious cam (all $2,000 worth of it!) while Alan mounted it.  Then it was up to Alan to mess with all the cables and cords to get them running.

All went really well except the microphone.  Turns out it needed a stereo jack and was really fussing about cutting in and out, but after an hour or more Alan got it safely tucked away in its junction box and it's been working fine since then.

The great thing is the VIEWS we get with this cam!  Holy moly!  That evening I could zoom in on Iris' face...just her face, while she dozed.  Not only is it beautiful to see, but it will help me check Rusty and Iris' beaks, talons, feet, and eyes for any problems without having to catch them out.  Very nice.

Critterwatcher and maxi23, my chat room moderators, are able to control the PTZ functions as well as me, so that's good to have help keeping it on the owls.

In the future I hope we can raise another $2,000 for another PTZ cam to go in the flight cage.

This is fun!!!  (Oh, and educational too.....)