In the middle of the night, a screech owl pays a call

“What bird is that?” The question, posed by my wife, came at about 2:20 a.m.

“What bird?” i asked groggily, awakening from a deep sleep.

“THAT bird,” she said. “Can’t you hear it? It woke me up.”

“No, I can’t.,” I said, glancing at the clock. I took a few seconds to debate whether it was worth getting up to turn on the Merlin app on my iPhone, which was on the charger next to the open window a few feet away in our bedroom.

“Why not?” I said to myself. When I got to the window, I could hear the bird, which was singing distantly in a low, trilling song at steady intervals. It wasn’t the classic hoot of a great-horned owl that we had heard after sunset a few nights prior.

I listened and listened some more, wracking my brain to see if I could dredge up a memory of a song that I was virtually certain I’d never heard before. Is it even a bird? I wondered. I’d heard a fox crying the night before. No, this a bird — a cuckoo, perhaps? No, definitely not. Then I looked down at Merlin on my iPhone, and there was the ID: Eastern screech owl!

Merlin lit up “screech owl” for several series of songs of the owl, the only creature making a sound in the still of night, save for, briefly, a distant emergency vehicle siren in the distance.

As a check on the ID, I switched to the “explore” section of Merlin and went to Eastern screech owl. The first recording of one there was not a great match, but the second* — Song (Northern) — was a near dead ringer.

Excited to add the owl to my life list, I tossed and turned before falling. back to sleep. That I started this post shortly after waking up about four hours later underscores my excitement. I’m also grateful that my wife’s hearing is better than mine!

*(I listened to the recording again just now and grabbed a screen shot, which tops this post. Also, I thought I had recorded a minute or so of the owl’s song on Merlin, but it seems I forgot to save the recording, alas.)