Three important owl points! 1) An owl interacted with me pretty pointedly last night. I was sitting on the porch and the owl left the new-box tree (but not the box itself) and swooped over to land on the rain gutter directly over my head. It then immediately went back to the tree. Either it nabbed a rodent on the roof (seems unlikely at the hour), was trying to attack me and misjudged the route (seems unlikely because apex predator), or was just trying to let me know it was there. Duly noted.
So I’m pretty sure the owl in question was Simon because 2) a solo owl was hanging around last night and made this same talking-to-itself hoot, but without the burble. I did a deeper dive into catalogs of barred owl noises and learned this is called an “ascending hoot,” although I didn’t get a good translation.
But I DID learn that 3) the female burble-at-end is actually a species-wide phenomenon! I am so proud of the fact that I derived this rule all by myself, from exactly one gazillion hours of watching owls, deducing who was who, and listening to them talk — and it turns out to be a real thing! That means that I am at least sometimes right when I guess who is who based on other stuff! Still haven’t figured out a reasonable way to include this knowledge on my resume, though.
Anyway here is (probably) Simon saying something to himself last night in either the nest tree or the new-box tree, shortly before contemplating crashing into my face. Yay owls!