Poking around at night by the headlamp again, endeavoring not to get eaten by a bear, I realized there was a faint sound that kept repeating, and I didn’t recognize it as anything ‘typical’ – the frogs were making a racket down at the pond, but this wasn’t a frog. So I started following it. This took me off of the property, so technically this isn’t an Estate Find, but I was there initially, so I’m counting it.
I located the noisemaker roughly a hundred meters from where I’d first heard it, and you’ll hear the audio in the video clip, so you should get the idea that this was initially right at the edge of hearing – I consider myself lucky that I can still hear things like this at my age, especially since I know that The Girlfriend cannot. I also had to pass directly under a streetlamp as I came closer, to say nothing of the headlamp light itself, so I was also lucky in that the noisemaker stayed put, but that was probably a factor of its age.
This is a good example of not just using one’s ears, but in realizing what particular sounds might mean, or at the very least, don’t belong among the ‘normal’ lineup of things you’re likely to hear. I suspected a bird, but I was honestly thinking more in lines of a nightjar (which I also would have been delighted to get, but likely would not have stuck around as long as this one did.)
Now, after the batteries died, I simply turned and walked back to Walkabout Estates, and hadn’t gotten very far when the calls of both mother and child get a lot closer together, more ‘talkative,’ so I turned back and could just barely see (the headlamp is dimmer than the flashlight I use for night video) that mother and child were now on the same branch right next to each other, with absolutely nothing I could do about it. Grumble mutter blaspheme and all that. As I said in the video, I’ll go into that in the post following.
Still, while hearing barred owls all the time around here, this is only the third or fourth time actually catching sight of one, and the first in capturing it on video, so I can’t complain too much. Well, not justifiably, anyway…