owl in a chimney, red blobs in the woods

Saturday night was the annual SOFO dinner at the South Fork Natural History Society Museum in Bridgehampton. I had a conversation with a gentleman who lives in Accabonac and who told me that he has a 'Screech Owl' living in his chimney. A little taken aback, I asked what it looked like but, alas, he had never seen it in the daylight. However, he informed me, he does hear it snoring in his fireplace where it apparently has put its nest on the damper! Now my curiosity was really piqued and I asked him how he knew it was a Screech Owl. Because, he said, I have heard its weird screech. Now Screech Owls do not, to my knowledge, snore nor actually screech (they are one of a number of misnamed bird). I suspect that the gentleman is the proud host to one of the few nesting pairs of Barn Owls left on the East End. This bird used to reside fairly widely in old barns and water towers but the barns have all been turned into guest houses or condos and the water towers have all collapsed. A chimney on Accabonac Harbor -- where there is plenty of open space for a Barn Owl to hunt rodents -- might be an excellent substitute.

Yesterday I wrote about the seafood shells on my neighbor's half dock. Apparently, even as I was writing, he had arrived to clean up the dock and attach the floating portion which juts out into Weesuck Creek. This morning, from this vantage point, I was able to watch the intrepid dockside muskrat swim to the next neighbor's dock and dive under. As I have mentioned before, this rodent has made his burrow under that floating dock which apparently keeps dry as it rises and falls with the tides!

On the flower front, Sundrops have appeared (the related Evening Primrose is not yet flowering) along with the common Daylilies, tiny white Dewberry flowers and the romantic rose-red Virginia or Wild Rose. But once again, the 'flower' of the morning was a slime mold -- this time a salmon red affair, again on a rotting log. Its blobs of color jump out from the forest floor, as spectacular as any wild flower.

Eric Salzman