Travel day, part 2…

The next huge surprise came on April 1, when I checked on the owls and was stunned to find a second owlet. Nope, I’m not even pranking you.

Sadly, I never saw the second one again, and I don’t even know how it met its demise. In fact, for a couple of weeks, I couldn’t find any great horned owls at all, and feared the worse, although I was also doing my best to keep my distance and check infrequently.

The good news is that on April 15, I found that the one remaining owlet had fledged, and perhaps that is why I hadn’t been able to find it for a while. What a scraggly mix of baby feathers and flight feathers, eh?

The family eventually returned to the downstream island, where we’ve seen the adult owls many times before, and then I was able to spot the owlet pretty often. In fact, the folks who joined the weekly wildlife walks even got to see it once or twice, although I did swear them to secrecy. Here’s the owlet with a parent on April 21.

Then I went to Arizona to hike the Grand Canyon with my sister.