What Forests Are Made Of

Northern Saw Whet Owl...and Community           10 June 2013                                                 

Truly tiny, the Saw Whet is named for the "tooting" sound it makes, a sound similar to the resonance of a saw blade as it is run against a sharpening or "whetting" stone.  It is this tiny tooting that first brought me to the owl, and it was careful tracking that made me able to find it again.   Even a tiny owl leaves many clues. A myriad of small signs in pellet casts and "white washings" below favorite roost trees narrow down the places to look.  A patient ear reveals the sounds.  Luck fills in the gaps.  

What makes a bird like this so spectacular is the whole of the environment that makes the bird possible.  The pictures are less without the beauty of lichen, leaf, and history of habitat. Indeed, the pictures would not be possible without them.  Birds choose habitats based on a wide assortment of "micro" habitat variables.  For each species, it is a finely balanced recipe.

Birds live in biological communities.  Plants support fruits and prey species, and plant structures at many levels lend to survival for each bird species.  The complexity of a forest community in the specific structural and living members are the answers to what possibilities exist for any given bird.  Often, a particular cadre of birds can be found together, responding, perhaps to different parts of a continuous habitat theme.   A forest is beautiful on many levels.

Finding this owl is analogous to finding so many other hidden secrets, even the little-known behaviors of common and "well-known" species of birds.  As I explore more and more of the details of forests across the state of Wisconsin, I find an almost unbelievable amount of community interdependence.  Each bird is evidence of thousands of working pieces, thousands of tiny stories, thousands of clues about how nature works.

All images were photographed on 10 June 2013 (as is the theme of this blog), but an assortment of cameras were used from the Canon Powershot SX230HS to Canon 40D ("pack camera") and Canon 7D ("nice camera").