A week or so ago, our neighbor told me that she had been on her porch watching a squirrel play dangerously close to the nest, when suddenly an owl swooped from somewhere and chased the squirrel away. I haven’t seen Simon doing daytime monitoring yet, so while I was jealous of her experience I wondered if he has started that behavior or if the squirrel just got unlucky when Daphne was out for a stretch. Then today I found this clip on the owlcam. It’s lovely quality, but not good enough to see which owl this is — except that at the end the owl flies off to the west, rather than going back into the nest. Daphne’s absences are pretty short these days, so an owl who a) happens to be outside and able to catch an interloper and b) stays outside after the interaction is probably Simon. Yay hormones!
A family of owls in Atlanta