Baring, base color, and bill. These are the 3 Bs that will help you get started identifying screech owl subspecies.
This article, from Flocking Around, had been the best comprehensive article I’ve come across.
While it’s not the easiest thing to identify grey secretive nocturnal birds, this will help you learn the key differences to tell them apart.
See if you can get them right after reading the article!
I’ll put the answers up in a separate post later so there’s no spoilers.
If anyone can tell me if spoiler tags are working across the majority of apps at this point and/or give me some instructions how to use them, is appreciate it. Checked the Join-Lemny instructions and tried doing it in Liftoff and Boost, but I can’t get it. Saw many threads though saying it wasn’t working across the board too.
Surprising little info on this out there. I’ll tell you the things I can fairly confidently say.
The main divider between the 2 subspecies is the Rocky Mountains. Screech Owls don’t migrate, and when they leave the nest as juveniles, they still only go a mile or 2 (<3 km) from where they were born. Having an important physical barrier, probably limits the majority of commingling.
Red morphs and the brown and grey ESO will mate. They don’t seem to worry about the difference in coloring.
Probably the main way they would tell each other apart, since they stay hidden as much as possible, is by their sounds they make when they do want to be found. They both have very distinct calls.
The Eastern has a trill sound, and also a horse whinny sound.
ESO Call
The Western has a “bouncing ball sound” that increased in frequency like if you’d drop a rubber ball or pingpong ball.
WSO Call
So while I’m mostly sure they could tell each other apart, if they happened to be in the same place somehow and took up an interest in each other, I couldn’t say exactly what would happen. I’m not sure if the visual cues would cancel the auditory ones or not for mating purposes.
their Whinny noise sounds like someone playing with a theremin, haha. Very interesting, thank you for your love of owls!
It does sound a bit like that!
I’m glad you’re enjoying the content!