Barred Mystery

We were restless this morning at 4 AM and so were the livestock in the ranch across the street. One of the animals trailed off into what sounded like an impersonation of a barred owl — low hooting usually transcribed “Who cooks for you?” — but I thought how could it be that? and stayed snuggled under the covers. We heard it again, and Pica startled. It was definitely the call of a barred owl. We heard it one more time, and Pica got up and threw some clothes on to go look for it.

The Central Valley of California is not the place one would expect to find a barred owl. I recalled that they occur in the Pacific Northwest forests, but we’re hardly surrounded by forests here. Pica came up with another possibility before she went outside: maybe it was the barred owl in captivity at the California Raptor Center, located about 650 meters from us across Putah Creek and over two levees. On the other hand, she said, the eagles there call all the time during the day, and we never hear them from our house. But that’s during daytime, and it was now a quiet, still cool night. Who knows how well the atmospherics would carry the sound?

Pica heard the bird a total of five times, but not outside. She walked to the bridge over the creek and from there could barely hear the mockingbird calling in our yard, so she didn’t think she’d be able to hear an owl at the Raptor Center.

Consulting the nearest reference source in the morning — Arnold Small’s book California Birds: Their Status and Distribution — it turns out that barred owls are quite recent arrivals in California, their first sighting being in 1981. Their range has been expanding rapidly throughout the Pacific Northwest, and moreover there is concern that the barred owl will compete with and/or hybridize with the endangered spotted owl.

One of my coworkers volunteers at the Raptor Center. She told me today that she has never heard their barred owl vocalize. But four in the morning isn’t the time she would be over there.

A mystery then, with two remote possibilities coming to mind. Through some fluke of atmospheric conditions and perhaps change in bird behavior, did we hear the barred owl at the Raptor Center, even though we’ve been in our house five years and have never heard anything resembling it before? Or was it a wild barred owl, perhaps a subadult leading its species’ dispersal into new points south in California?