Outdoor encounters with regal and secretive owls in their natural habitats are not likely to be forgotten, and a Benjamin Logan High School graduate who now serves as an Ohio Dominican University associate professor of environmental science is seeking input from area residents to document species of this nocturnal and intriguing bird living in the local area.
Dr. Blake Mathys, who resides in Union County near West Mansfield and also hosts annual owl walks at his farm each year, has founded the Central Ohio Owl Project. The program is currently accepting owl reports from any part of Ohio at www.ohiodominican.edu/OwlProject, and will keep the locations of owls confidential, with publications reporting the sightings only at the township or county level.
His personal search also will be focused on Logan, Union, Hardin, Marion, Morrow, Knox, Licking, Fairfield, Pickaway, Madison, Franklin, Clark, Champaign and Delaware counties.
“Owls are well-known and charismatic birds, and I felt that people would be excited to learn about owls and contribute their own reports to help in the understanding of owl abundance and distribution,” he said this week in an e-mail.
This project was prompted by Dr. Mathys’ findings that owls, especially the rare species of Northern Saw-whet Owls, Long-eared Owls, and Barn Owl that are the focus of the study, appeared to be under-reported in citizen-science databases, sometimes as a result of individuals trying to protect the birds.
“I came to realize that owls, and especially rare owls, are much less likely to be reported to bird-monitoring programs like eBird,” the program founder said. “There are probably a couple of reasons for this: rare owls often attract attention, and some people don’t want to make it known that they have a rare species on their property because they don’t want lots of people visiting trying to see it (in some instances, some have trespassed in the hopes of seeing owls).
“The second reason is related: in the past, some owls have been disturbed by the attention that they received, to the point that they’ve abandoned their roosts.”
The BLHS graduate, who also attended Calvary Christian School from first-grade through eighth-grade, said the information collected in the study will help to better understand the actual distribution and abundance of owls spending the winter in Ohio.
“Many species of owls are very secretive and difficult to find; having the help of the public will increase our knowledge, since many people may be aware of a Barn Owl living in their silo or a Long-eared Owl spending its winter in spruce trees on their property, but not realize that anyone would be interested in that information.
“All reports that are submitted will be kept strictly confidential.”
There are eight species of owls that can be found in Ohio every year. Three of these are found in most parts of the state and are relatively common and are found in Ohio year-round: Great Horned Owl, Barred Owl, and Eastern Screech-Owl, said Dr. Mathys, who first spent time looking for owls in wintertime with friends while attending Ohio Northern University for his undergraduate degree.
He noted that Snowy Owls and Short-eared Owls occur primarily in the winter, and tend to be found in open areas (e.g., Snowy Owls like airports and Short-eared Owls prefer large grassy areas). These two species are relatively likely to be seen during daylight (especially dawn and dusk in the case of Short-eared Owls), and therefore their presence can be more easily detected, he said.
The final three species and the focus of the project are harder to find, as they are almost completely nocturnal, and they usually choose roost sites that hide them well, the project founder said.
Long-eared Owls and Northern Saw-whet Owls like to roost in thick vegetation; they are often found in evergreen trees, spending the day sleeping, only coming out to hunt under the cover of darkness, the ODU professor explained.
Barn Owls are often found in buildings; barns, silos, and other structures are used, as well as evergreen trees.
Even when owls aren’t seen, their presence can often be inferred by the finding of owl pellets (undigestible parts that owls regurgitate) below a roost site, related Dr. Mathys, who earned a bachelor of science in biology and minor in field biology at Ohio Northern University.
Following his time at ONU, he worked several biology field technician jobs, spending a couple of summers in Everglades National Park working with an endangered subspecies of sparrow; two months in the mountains of Washington state counting migrating hawks; and two months on the Farallon Islands (in California) monitoring elephant seals.
He attended Rutgers University for his Ph.D., studying songbirds that people have introduced to islands, and was able to do field work in Bermuda, Trinidad, Puerto Rico and Hawaii.
In 2012, the area native began teaching at Ohio Dominican University, and instructs a variety of biology and environmental science classes and also started a Birding Club at the university.
“I’ve always been interested in owls, and when I started looking for a new research project (since we don’t have many tropical islands in Ohio), I decided to start focusing on owls,” he said.
“There have been over 1,300 reports submitted to the project so far, and targeted searched by project collaborator John Kuenzli and I have found four Northern Saw-whet Owls, three Long-eared Owls, and one Barn Owl.”