Thursday, March 15, 2012

Barred Owl at Cold Spring Park!

I was just reading the Massbird list archives and saw that our own Pete Gilmore found a Barred Owl at Cold Spring Park this past Saturday! He found the owl right where the Cochituate Aqueduct crosses Plymouth Road. The Owl was then re-found on Tuesday by the vertical jump station of the life course trail (just north of the aqueduct and off-leash area for dogs).

So I decided to make my first visit to Cold Spring Park to see what I could find. Yesterday at 7pm I started from Plymouth Rd. and the park was very quiet with only a few Canada geese calling in the background. I made my way along the life course trail and was just about to give up when a rabbit made a bee-line across the trail and towards the houses to the west and a squirrel was making some unusual calls. In the gathering dusk I could just make out a large set of brown/grey wings swoop down towards the rabbit and then wing off into the woods. I lost sight of it as my eyes struggled to make out shapes or movement. Could this have been the owl? What ever bird of prey I saw was certainly a silent flier as the only thing I could hear was the wing-whir of a woodcock displaying high above. I will have to come back to see if I can't get a better sighting of this owl.

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