Behavioral Conditioning and Techniques for Trapping Barred Owls (Strix Varia)
2008
Bierregaard, Richard O. | Harrold, Eric S. | McMillian, Michael A.
Providing mice to (“mousing”) Spotted Owls (Strix occidentalis) to determine if a bird has a mate, find nests, and locate young in the vicinity of the nest is a standard technique in the study of this species (Forsman 1983, Blakesley et al. 2001, Hobbs et al. 2005). In the course of our ongoing ecological studies of Barred Owls (Strix varia) in the central Piedmont of North Carolina (Harrold 2003, Mason 2004) and Florida, we expanded on “mousing” by training owls to associate a specific sound with food provisioning. Spotted Owl researchers have not, to the best of our knowledge, trained owls to respond to specific sounds. In addition to facilitating trapping, this refinement of the mousing technique made it easy and efficient to provide mice to our study birds and collect data on nests and reproduction, as do Spotted Owl researchers. We here describe our training process and trapping techniques. Our trapping efforts usually began with noose cages, or bal-chatris (Berger and Mueller 1959), but we often had to rely on other trapping methods when birds became trap-shy. We discuss the different capture techniques and the benefits of training the subject birds prior to trapping. We present this information as an aid to researchers studying Barred Owls and believe the technique should be applicable to other owl species and perhaps even certain Falconiformes.
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