Tuesday Evening Lecture: The Short-eared Owl Problem: Uncertainty and the Challenge of Studying a Nomadic Raptor

Short-eared owls are one of the most widespread owls in the world and, for many birders, one of the easiest owls to observe, yet they remain surprisingly difficult to understand. What we think we know about them often turns out to be incomplete. Where do they come from? Do they return to the same places each winter? And how do you work with a species that may only be present seasonally and in small numbers, and refuses to follow predictable patterns? In this talk, Alex Pellegrini of the Maryland Bird Conservation Partnership's Farmland Raptor Program takes you from the global context of Short-eared Owl research into an ongoing effort to study wintering birds in Maryland. Through trial and error, long nights in the field, and repeated setbacks, he walks through what it actually takes to study a highly nomadic raptor in low-density landscapes. This is not a story about having…