Nocturnal calling

By Michael Jamison - 12/13/2008

Jess Crowley holds a long-eared owl at arm's length recently after a team from the Owl Research Institute captured the bird.

NINEPIPE — A half moon hung high against fierce autumn blue, lingering late above the ragged Mission Mountain crest.

Somewhere between those icy heights and the knee-high rush of grass underfoot, a red-tailed hawk circled, and cried shrill, and beat southward into a watery morning sun. The gloss-black shadow of a crow followed, wings slicing the air loudly, as if ripping through old silk.

Both birds had been startled skyward by Denver Holt, who was crashing through a narrow shelterbelt of crabapple and hawthorn, calling out "hey bear, hey bear" — despite the fact that he was deep into November.

"You never know what you might kick out of here," Holt said, and as he spoke a great-horned owl lifted absolutely silent from the tangle, not a whisper of feather.

Owls are startling that way, sudden and without warning, then vanishing in a slip of the light. No shriek, no draft of wing; they are the quiet ones, and the great-horned stole northward and was gone.

But Holt knows their owlish secrets, knows which island of brush and forest owls roost in during the day, knows which tree — which branch, even — they'll return to once spooked.

And so here he stakes his wisps of netting, thin as spiders' webs, slung between branch and bramble. He's captured thousands of owls this way, measuring and banding and tracking his way from the arctic to the tropics.

Snowy owls, boreal owls, saw-whet, pygmy and flammulated owls. Great grays and great horneds. Every winter, he and his crew ski 500 miles through Glacier National Park to track northern hawk owls.

The result is some of the best owl data out there, and some of the longest-running scientific projects in the field.

"We've been out here for 20 years," Holt said. "All year-round, working in the field." He stops, listens to the uproar of birdsong he's just triggered, and grins like a kid cut loose in the woods for a day with nothing to do but roll over logs just to see what's beneath.

"This sure beats an office and a desk." Holt was supposed to be at his desk back in the 1980s, when he was a student at the University of Montana. But he and a friend had found a clutch of owls up Pattee Canyon, and started cutting class to watch the birds.

Their grades took a dive that semester, he admits, but they published a scientific paper based on daily observations.

"It was a turning point," Hold said. "I'd found my niche in observational field work." Holt went on to work for an alphabet soup of state and federal agencies — BLM, USFWS, USFS — "and I enjoyed it," he said. "But I was scared of the desk." When he looked around the office he saw too many wildlife specialists stuck behind computer screens.

"I knew I couldn't do that," he said.

And so Holt hooked up with the nonprofit world, with Audubon and the Nature Conservancy — and the more he learned about those outfits the more he thought, "Jeez, I could do this." So he did.

In 1988, in a move he calls "more guts than it was brains," Denver Holt launched the Owl Research Institute, a shoestring operation dedicated as much to the lifestyle of field research as anything else.

Twenty years later, the lifestyle remains remarkably unchanged.

"We're still out there having fun at it," he said.

But along the way ORI has grown up, becoming a nationally and internationally recognized name in the fields of owl research, education and conservation.

Holt and ORI have published scores of scientific papers, popular articles and monographs. In the book "Arctic Wings," Holt wrote a central chapter and Jimmy Carter wrote the foreword. They've been featured on the cover of National Geographic magazine and soon will appear in "Frozen Earth," the BBC sequel to the wildly popular global documentary "Planet Earth." ORI has pioneered avian science, and ORI has put together children's books.

ORI has won research awards from far-flung locations, and ORI has led citizen field trips straight out the back door.

But most of all ORI has slowly, steadily, carefully built up decades of consistent research, the sort of long-term baseline that most scientists can only dream about.

When people want to know what's out there in the valley-bottom grasslands, they ask Denver Holt. Because he keeps 100 field guides in the ORI rig, and he keeps his eyes open while hunting owls.

After 20 years afield, Holt can tell you about the plants and mammals and reptiles and amphibians of the grasslands, and can tell you the hotspots most threatened by urban sprawl. But mostly, he can tell you about voles.

You can't study owls without studying voles. In a big plastic bucket back at the ORI farm near Charlo, Holt rattles a pile of tiny rodent skulls picked from owl pellets.

A long-eared owl, like the one he was hunting through the shelterbelt, might eat 1,000 voles a year — a fact Holt came by the hard way, pellet by pellet, some 30,000 tiny animal parts that proved to be 95 percent vole. Science isn't always sexy.

He recently received another 220 pounds of pellets from the arctic — much to the dismay of the local post office — and has them stored in the chicken coop until he can find time to pick them apart. Holt knows what he'll find inside — lemmings, which are to snowy owls what voles are to long-eared owls — and so he's been learning a thing or two about lemmings along the way, too.

But here's the rub: "No one's going to save the arctic for a lemming, a little brown rat," he said. Just as no one's going to save Montana's brushy bottomlands for voles.

Owls, on the other hand, have charisma. They look a bit like us, with those round faces and unblinking eyes centered up front. They have a magic, and a mystery, and are absolutely mythic.

Their song — which is no more birdsong than a duck's raspy quack — can float through the dark like fog, or hiss from the barn rafters. For poets Blair and Wordsworth, the song was a harbinger of doom. Science knows the boreal owl as Aegolius funereus, from the Greek for funeral, because it can and sometimes does wail the dead from midnight shadows.

Owls associate with the likes of witches and warlocks, and see as if by magic through the curtain of night.

But it's not magic, of course. It's an abundance of rods — those retinal cells sensitive to dim light. Likewise, their muffled silence is no mystery, but rather serrated feathers — modified barbs lining the leading edge of the primary wing feathers — that scatter the air for stealth approaches.

Scientists such as Holt know all that, but it doesn't dampen the wonder.

"Owls have had a place in the human story for centuries," he said.

Now, he hopes to write a new chapter in which humans conserve owls, and owl habitat, and along the way create safe havens for all those other grassland denizens, including the much-maligned vole.

Out on the wetland flats of the Mission Valley, Holt and his team fan out and cross quickly through isolated pockets of forest. This is muddy-booted science, scraped and scratched and tangled and torn science, research amid the hawthorns.

When they spot a long-eared owl lifting across a spring-fed pond, Holt is suddenly all business.

"Can you get in there without getting wet?" he asks.

"Well ..." The research assistant isn't so sure.

"OK then," Holt says. "You might have to get wet." And so she does, clambering through muck and mire to string the nets.

When Holt started this long-eared owl survey, two decades back, no one knew where to find a roost. Now, he knows dozens of sites just between here and Missoula.

With 1,525 individual long-eared owls netted so far, he's only beginning to answer some of the most basic questions. Science doesn't know much about population dynamics, or mortality, or breeding, or migration. Holt worked 15 years before he recaptured a female that was born here.

So where do they go? At least one was found down near Mexico City, but others seem to stick closer to home, and some winter right where they summer.

It seems they're here when voles are plentiful, but where are they the rest of the time? And what's with these big winter gatherings, these parliaments where upward of 50 owls might roost together? Are they family groups?

Holt's now using genetic sampling and other high-tech tools, along with good old observation, to unravel the mysteries. The findings, he hopes, could change the way we think about climate change, and about forest management, and about continued development of open space.

"But every answer raises another question," he said. "We just keep piling on one question after another question after another question." And you get the feeling he wouldn't have it any other way.

Morning was slipping into midday and the moon finally had faded when Holt and his team strung the last of their nets. The traps were dwarfed by the great wild open, but he had placed them carefully, cutting off natural tunnels beneath a tangled arch of branches.

When the long-eared owl swooped into the mesh, and the lattice folded around her, it happened in absolute silence.

A field assistant gripped the feathered legs while Holt and his team measured and weighed the bird, banded it and gathered samples for later lab work.

Throughout, the owl did not blink, staring straight ahead with huge fixed eyes the color of sunlight shining through honey. Her feathers were painted late autumn, hues of bark and lichen and splashes of snow.

Holt worked quickly, and carefully, because the black talons gleamed sharp and curved, and the pivoting head was fronted by a scimitar beak, snatching to take a chunk out of someone.

ORI teams have brought hundreds of people into the field over the years, to look into those bright owl eyes, "because that's what conservation is about, is getting the public involved. I think we've been leaders in bringing science to the public," Holt said.

It's the kind of work that earned him the 2000 Montana Wildlife Biologist of the Year award, granted by the Wildlife Society.

That his independent scientific research institute has survived to celebrate a 20th birthday is impressive. That it is considered a world leader — perhaps the world leader — in owl research is nothing short of remarkable.

When Holt loosed this owl - the 1,526th long-ear captured and banded since the study began — she disappeared almost immediately into thick cover, utterly silent, leaving nothing in her wake except one soft and downy feather. And, of course, a notebook page full of information.

"That we're still doing stuff like this for a job," Holt said, "well, that's not so bad, I think." "I mean, science can be really fun, if you can stay out of the office long enough to enjoy yourself." Reporter Michael Jamison may be reached at (800) 366-7186 or mjamison@missoulian.com. Photographer Kurt Wilson may be reached at 523-5244 or by e-mail at kwilson@missoulian.com.