My Lynden grandpa, John Schuyleman, shot a big white winter owl, probably a snowy owl, and gave it to the Lynden druggist, Edward Edson, who had the owl stuffed and placed it in his collection of stuffed owls in his drug store. Eventually, Grandpa’s owl ended up it the Whatcom Museum. I remember visiting the museum when I was small. My mother pointed out Grandpa’s owl, but I don’t know if they still display it.
Now, barn owls occupy the old barn. The photo here of an owl perching at the peak of the barn was taken recently by Jake Knapp (C9 Photography) and Monica Mercier who are staying on the homestead while we wait for it to sell. Notice that this is a barn owl, not a barred owl, which I have heard are displacing barn owls in some areas.
While Dad (Ted) was still milking cows, the barn owls stayed away. Dad always liked to keep several cats around the barn to keep the rodent population down. Between no rodents and continuous commotion in the barn, the owls were shy, but every few weeks one would swoop in and check up on the barn. The barn owls roosted in the woods. We watched them hunt in the evening, gliding low over the fields. My mother liked to pick up their shed feathers and display them as bouquets in flower vases in the house. Owl roosts were easy to find in the woods because the tree trunks where they rested, usually cedars, were blazed with white droppings, called “mutes.”
After Dad quit milking and the barn quieted down, the barn owls moved in, roosting on the hay fork track and at the top of the silo. They made their presence known by splashes of white like the ones in the woods and the litter of owl pellets—lumps of regurgitated fur, feathers, and bones.
When I was a kid, late summer was owl hunting season. I think Dad may have invented our method of owl hunting. I’m not sure if we hunted screech owls or saw-whet owls. Dad called them screech owls, but from what I have read, the owls we used to catch acted like saw-whets.
In late summer, small owls roosted low in the vine maple grove that grew behind the barn. After milking, when it began to get dark, Dad would lead my cousins and I out to the vine maple grove with flashlights and heavy gloves. We would keep the flashlights off until we saw the silhouette of an owl on a branch low enough to reach. Then we would turn on the flashlights aimed at the eyes of the owl. If we were lucky, or the owl was unlucky, it would be blinded and freeze long enough for one of us to circle behind the poor animal and grab it in heavy gloved hands and stuff it in a burlap sack.
I understand that freezing when approached is characteristic of the saw-whet owl, so I suspect these were saw-whets, not screech owls. However, I recall that the owl we caught had ear tufts and was a little larger than a typical saw-whet, so it may have been a screech owl. The hoot of the western screech owl is heard frequently around the farm, but I’ve seen and heard saw-whets also. I once saw a row of several tiny saw-whets lined up on a cedar bough.
We only succeeded in catching an owl once. My older cousin, Steve, did the catching as I remember. The owl put up a fight with its lethally sharp beak and talons. Blood flowed from several of us kids before we got the owl in the sack. Thinking back, I would say that we were lucky not to have been seriously wounded.
We took the owl to my uncle’s house. At the time, he raised rabbits and had a row rabbit hutches next to his garden. A hutch was empty and we let the owl crawl out of the sack in the hutch. My memory is a bit hazy, but I think the owl escaped the next day. Or maybe one of the adults showed some sense and let the terrified bird go.
After the success, no matter how much we begged, Dad never had time for another owl hunt.