Let’s start with her astonishing eyes.
They were huge. If human eyes were as large in our faces, relatively, we’d have eyes the size of large lemons. The yellow of her eyes was so intense, they seemed to glow, electric and incandescent. They were the only splash of color on her gray, well-camouflaged body.
I held her legs between my fingers and lifted her to my face, eye-to-eye with a Whiskered Screech-Owl, one of the least-studied and most mysterious of all 19 owl species in the United States.
I had joined David Oleyar, a raptor biologist with HawkWatch International, and his research team in the Chiricahua Mountains in southeastern Arizona, where he conducts what may be the only systematic study that includes the species. “It’s one of the groups of birds we refer to as ‘knowledge gap species,’” he says. “The combination of their small size, secretive nature, and nocturnal habits make them a challenge to work with.”
Plus, Whiskered has a more restricted range than its cousins, the widespread Eastern and Western Screech-Owls. In the United States, Whiskered is found in the mountains of southeastern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico — the region’s famed Sky Islands that are biodiversity hotspots and magnets for rare species. The bird’s range continues south throughout the mountainous forests of Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and to northern Nicaragua.
Oleyar had captured the female in a mist net as part of his study. She was so small: about 6 inches long and weighing 86 grams (3 ounces). I was about 1,000 times her size. Herear tufts. She looked at me with only a casual, almost dismissive regard. I would love to know what she saw, looking at me. But her wall-eyed stare was wild and impenetrable. This experience was not about connecting with an owl. It was all about her intense animal presence.
