That’s the call of a Northern Saw-Whet owl.
It’s not coming from an actual owl, though. Researcher Mitchell Pruitt is playing a recording of breeding and communicative hoots to try and lure some of the species into a large net along a hiking trail… For science.
“So these are mist nets,” Pruitt said. “They're pretty standard for catching a wide variety of birds, including Saw Whet owls. They're multi-tiered nets, and the way you set them up with these main lines here creates a sort of a saggy trough, so when the birds hit the net, they roll into this trough and get caught. A lot of birds that you capture with mist nets, you capture passively, so just hoping that they eventually come over here and fly into the nets. But we're using an audio lure, which is pretty standard for this type of owl, and that's going to be the species vocalization played on loop, very loudly.”
Hopefully, a Saw Whet will find its way into the net so Pruitt and his assistant Christian Machen can record biometrics and strap on an ID band and a transmitter to track its migration.
It’s a brisk November night at the Ozark Natural Science Center in the Madison County Wildlife Management Area. Pruitt says a cold front should be pushing owls toward the region and maybe into the nets. But for now, they trudge back up to the education center to wait.
Pruitt is a visiting professor at the University of Arkansas in the biology department. You might remember him from a previous version of Ozarks at Large when he was still a Ph.D candidate, studying migration and overwintering ecology of Saw Whet owls in northwest Arkansas. Since completing his degree earlier this year, he’s founded the Ozark Bird Conservancy to further his research on migratory raptors.
“So this is an idea that I've been kicking around with several others for several years now,” Pruitt said. “And lots of regions of North America have an overarching nonprofit research organization for birds that works in conservation management, research, education, and this region lacks that. So, we lack a centralized, non-academic, non-government organization to centralize bird research and bring collaborators together in a nonprofit capacity. And so that's a that's a niche that I really wanted to fill with this organization.”
JT: And so when people think of bird nonprofits, some people might think of the Audubon Society– And there is a presence within Arkansas of the Audubon Society. So, how do you differentiate from that?
“So Audubon in Arkansas, they do a lot of widespread research across the Americas, with some focus regionally,” Pruitt said. “But in the region, they also play a large education outreach role that's missing that sort of region-specific research role. And so there, there are a lot of things that can be done in the bird research world, here in the Ozark Highlands, or more broadly, in the Interior Highlands, if you want to encompass much of the rest of the state, parts of Missouri and Oklahoma, where there are misses from these larger continent-wide and international organizations.”
JT: I see. So the Ozark Bird Conservancy, your nonprofit, will be able to zoom in to these smaller pockets of the world and study more specific things?
“Right, so focusing more specifically on this region,” Pruitt said. “Although we don't want to limit ourselves to broad-scale collaborations, if that may come in the future, but for now, our focus is very much on the Interior Highlands.”
During this first season of study, Pruitt is focusing on Saw Whet owl migration monitoring. For the last two weeks of October, he was at the Ozark Natural Science Center night after night, playing owl recordings into the darkness.
He’s aiming to gather important data about the abundant yet relatively under-studied species.
“They're just small and secretive,” Pruitt said. “So as birds of prey, as predators, not knowing that this species is inhabiting certain ecosystems that are habitats and places that we didn't know that they were in previously, is not good, especially from a conservation and management perspective, because if this, if this were a species that needed some sort of management or protection, then we wouldn't know enough about their populations to understand how best to help them.”
After a 45-minute interval, Pruitt steps back out into the woods to check the nets. Nothing.
He waits again. Checks and finds a small owl clinging to the nylon cord.
JT: What were you just down there doing?
“So we were down there taking the bird out of the net,” Pruitt said. “So once they get caught in the net. They roll into the trough, like I mentioned earlier, and it's usually pretty straightforward getting them out, but sometimes it can take a little time. This one had a death grip on the net.”
Pruitt and Machen place the owl into a cloth sack to take it back up to the science center.
Once inside, the two scientists begin hurriedly gathering morphometric data on this new specimen.
“So, wing length, tail length, bill size, and several other measurements will help us determine the sex of this bird,” Pruitt said. “Like most birds of prey, females are larger on average, so a heavier mass and longer wing could mean that this bird is a female and the opposite. A smaller mass and smaller wing length would suggest that it's a male. There's a pretty significant overlap in Saw Whets where some individuals end up being unknown. We'll take a blood sample, too, for genetic sexing because you'll see us do some weird stuff in a few minutes, and we're taking extra measurements to hopefully come up with a better, more holistic field method to sex them.”
The owl is a Saw Whet, a small bird about the size of a soda can. Its large yellow eyes gaze about the room from its rounded dish face. White feathers speck is brown head and body, its talons gripping to anything within reach. Pruitt determines the owl is a female. They turn off the lights and shine a black light on the owl’s wings. This is to determine her relative age. Hatch feathers shine pink under blacklight, so if there is less color, it’s an older bird.
There’s a good mixture of both, so they conclude that this owl is more than two years old.
Now that her physical is complete, Pruitt says it’s time to give this Saw Whet some accessories that will allow him to track her migration and be reidentified if she’s ever caught again.
First, up: an ID band.
“The bands are issued by the USGS bird banding laboratory to permitted scientists, and each band has a unique number on it,” Pruitt said. “So it's like giving this individual a unique identifier so that if it's ever recaptured again somewhere else, or if it's found dead and the band is recovered, something like that, we can infer movement based on point A to point B, so where it was banded versus where it showed up.”
He then moves on to a more modern way of tracking birds. He prepares to strap a small radio transmitter to the owl. These are relatively new gadgets created by a company called Motus. The transmitter’s like a tiny backpack that weighs less than a gram. Once it's turned on, these little devices allow researchers to track birds’ migration patterns more accurately than traditional methods.
“Each one has a nano tag that's an individual identifier,” Pruitt said. “And so the cool thing about this project is that I mean, a, it's open source, but B, there are these networks of towers now that are on this frequency across North America, and there are a lot of them in Europe and Northern Africa too. And when they pick up the VHF signal, they'll get the metadata from the nanotag, and it, you know, theoretically, immediately uploads to the open-source data system. So you can, sort of, as long as your bird or whatever is pinging the towers, you can keep up with it as it goes. There haven't been a lot of people working on this Motus project in Arkansas yet. And I don't want to say these are the first birds to get a Motus transmitter in Arkansas because that's probably not true, but they're definitely the first Saw Whets and among some of the first birds, in general, to get one of these transmitters in Arkansas, which is pretty cool.”
This is one of five nanotags Pruitt hopes to send out on the backs of Saw Whets. Deploying these Motus tags is the Ozark Bird Conservancy’s first major undertaking– Pruitt’s calling it the Interior Highlands migratory owl project– And once all the transmitters are out on the backs of Saw Whets, OBC will move on to studying long-eared owls.
“This is a species that is pretty rare and cryptic across North America,” Pruitt said. “Especially here in eastern North America, where they spend the fall and winter, so their nonbreeding season is largely unknown, and there are plenty of records of the species occurring here in Arkansas and the greater Interior Highlands, but nobody's really targeted them here for research. And so what are they doing? Where are they, again, another important predator within our ecosystems that we haven't really even known about?”
After the Interior Highlands migratory owl project is complete, they’ll begin studying raptors in urban environments.
“The Urban Raptor Monitoring Project is an idea that we've had that we would like to pursue in the near future,” Pruitt said. “This is assessing habitat use and population dynamics in birds of prey in a rapidly urbanizing area like northwest Arkansas. So how? How does the growth that we're experiencing in suburban and urban northwest Arkansas affect these important predators that are here in our ecosystems but that aren't really being targeted for research? And northwest Arkansas is the perfect place for a study like this because it is rapidly growing, and we have a good base for both development and an appreciation for green space and the outdoors. And so being able to compare how different birds of prey are doing across a gradient of sites ranging from rural to urban will really help inform not just for Northwest Arkansas but across the continent, and maybe even across the world, how urbanization can affect the populations and the occurrence of these predators.”
The Ozark Bird Conservancy will continue to study these elusive predators, from tracking Saw Whet owls to exploring the mysteries of Long-eared owls and urban raptors. Pruitt says this small but dedicated team is carving out an essential niche in bird conservation. Their work promises to shine a light on species that are often overlooked, while their innovative use of technology, like the Motus tracking system, is setting a new standard for ecological research in the region.
For Pruitt and his team, it’s not just about collecting data—it’s about understanding how these birds fit into the larger tapestry of the Ozarks' ecosystems. And as their findings take flight, they’ll contribute vital insights that could shape conservation efforts locally and beyond.
