ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, January 15, 1996 TAG: 9601150097
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B-6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BILL COCHRAN OUTDOOR EDITOR
For birders, it's no longer just binoculars and a Peterson field guide.
The new tools of the trade include the Internet, cellular phones and digital cameras.
Some of these are playing a role in the fascination that birders in Virginia, North Carolina and Tennessee have for an unusually large migration of Northern saw-whet owls this winter.
``It is one of the biggest migrations - ever,'' said Barry Kinzie, a birder who lives near Troutville, where a family orchard rapidly has been turned into a nature center called Woodpecker Ridge.
This winter, Roanoke Valley Bird Club members haven't spotted one of the fist-size owls, but Kinzie believes there is a good chance that will happen.
``I think they are out there,'' he said. ``We just haven't found them.''
Local birders have been encouraged by reports of saw-whet spottings coming over the Internet and other means of communication. Some bird-banding facilities to the north and along the coast have been recording record numbers.
Kinzie believes the owls are here in unusually large numbers, because they have migrated south to ride out inclement weather in the mid-latitudes. Unfortunately, the same kind of weather locally has hampered recent efforts to view one.
The Internet has disseminated fascinating information on the discovery of a saw-whet in Eastern Tennessee by Wallace Coffey and Rick Knight. It was reported to be the first of its kind ever captured and banded in the Southern Appalachians.
Coffey, the editor of The Migrant, a Tennessee ornithological journal, and a member of the board of directors of the Virginia Society of Ornithology, became intrigued with the number of owl sightings that appeared in the hawk migration reports he was compiling.
Over the Internet, he learned about a birder in eastern North Carolina who had captured a half-dozen saw-whets in a single night.
``I thought, he is the same latitude that we are,'' said Coffey.
So Coffey called Knight, a fellow birder. A few evenings later, the two scouted a spot in a Johnson City, Tenn., park near Boone Lake. It appeared to be similar to the habitat described by the North Carolina birder. Knight put up nets, while Coffey, who is a master bird-bander, fed batteries into the boom box he had borrowed from his daughter to amplify owl calls.
``We decided we'd check back every three to four hours,'' Coffey said.
There was nothing in the nets at 9 p.m., but when Coffey and Knight returned about midnight, one of the nets held a saw-whet.
``That just stunned us,'' Coffey said. ``No one had ever heard one or seen one there. This was just unbelievable. It was almost as peculiar as if there is a big migration of ducks on the Eastern Shore and someone in Roanoke would go out in the dark and fire a shot into the air and get one.
``After we got the bird, we weighed it and measured it. We looked at it forever. We didn't have a camera with us. We weren't that confident. We started high-fiving.''
When Coffey put the information on the Internet, it attracted congratulations from as far away as Canada.
``This little owl is very, very tame, about the size of a Coke can at full growth, just a tiny thing, an innocent thing, kind of lovable - he doesn't look very ferocious,'' said Coffey.
``I think Woody [Norwood] Middleton [of Roanoke] and I are about the only two around here who have spotted one,'' said Kinzie. ``I have seen one in Virginia in my birding career.''
A few of the owls are believed to nest in the spruce-forest high country of Virginia, places like the Mount Rogers-Whitetop Mountain section of Grayson County and the Laurel Fork area of Highland County. But most of the birds in the region are believed to have migrated from the North.
The role of the Internet, cellular phones and digital cameras in birding is just beginning, Coffey said.
``People see reports on the Internet from us on how we saw a saw-whet and it stimulates them to think that they can go out in their area and do the same thing,'' Coffey said.
Digital cameras can be used to take pictures of unusual birds and quickly put them on the Internet, he said. Cellular phones can immediately alert other birders in a region of a rare find.
Birders, such as hawk migration observers, soon will be connecting lap-top computers to cellular phones and reporting from the scene, Coffey said. Computers will take the information and form it into graphics.
``It won't be long before you will be able to pull up a map and see where the actual flights are going by,'' said Coffey.
LENGTH: Medium: 85 lines ILLUSTRATION: GRAPHIC: The Saw-whet owl, from Peterson's Field Guide. color.by CNB