To Tell Or Not To Tell

Last weekend a friend of mine and I were out birding, and not seeing the King Eider that we were looking for. On our way back home, he got a text about a Saw-whet Owl roosting nearby. We were excited to see it, and it was a lifer for him. We got very precise directions, but upon getting there, it was still difficult to find the owl in the small cedar tree that it was perched in. Saw-whets are small, and this one wasn't moving, in fact it slept the entire time we were there.

The bird was right on a road in Hope Valley, RI, and cars had to slow to pass, even though we were on the side of the narrow road, as the shoulder is comprised of several feet of icy snow. There was no way to look at this bird without drawing attention to it. I was really grateful to have seen the owl and wanted to pass on that experience to other people, but how to do it without risking the bird's safety?
The light was horrible when we were there, and I thought it would be a bad photo op for people. Other photographers have since proven me wrong!!

Sharon Stiteler, aka "birdchick" just write a blog about the same exact thing, how to view an owl without disturbing it. I didn't have internet for a couple of days which allowed me to stew on the issue a little. In the end, I decided to put the bird on the RI list serve without giving directions to the site, and requested interested parties to contact me if they wanted to see it. Only five people ended up getting in touch with me, and of those, only 3 got to see the bird before it left its roost. I know through word of mouth that more people went to look at and photograph the owl, and it's impossible to know how many, and what happened, but the owl is now gone. It turns out that the owl had actually been there since December and that other birders had known about it, and had not told anyone, which was probably why it hung around for so long.

So, am I to blame for its disappearance?? As far as I can tell, I most probably had something to do with it, and that sucks. At the same time, I know that a few people got to see a Saw-whet Owl for the first time in their lives, and I don't know the exact circumstances that caused the owl to move. Maybe it was totally unrelated. Maybe not. I imagine I will be blamed by some for this, probably the birders who knew about it initially and didn't tell anyone. It's always an issue whether or not to make sensitive bird sightings public or not. Had I not told anyone, come springtime when everyone hears about the Saw-whet Owl that no one got to see I would have been accused of keeping it to myself and not sharing, which, if harm did come to the owl because of this, is of course a much better outcome than having birders cause stress for the owl. Personally, I hope that the bird moved off of the road and a little further from the danger posed by automobiles, but I will never know for sure if I am the reason behind the bird's disappearance, and what the factors were behind it.

On a side note, I also struck out looking for a male Eurasian Green-winged Teal in Westerly, but I did get to be closer to a White-winged Scoter than I had ever been and managed a few shots in the waning light.