Still no owl pictures to show. I got out the big ladder this afternoon for a visit to the Wildcam camera on the tree opposite Sandy’s barred owl nesting box.

Retrieved 36 images from the SD memory card and replaced the four C cells (two corroded). Camera was displaying the low-battery indicator, but the correct date. The images were dated January 8-21, 2011. As you can see above, from the location of the camera I could see twigs and even green leaves in the opening of the nesting box. We’ve read that barred owls do not add materials to a nesting place — but sometimes squirrels render an owl box uninhabitable to owls by filling it with debris. I moved the ladder from the camera to the nesting box and knocked on the door, but heard no response, and so began reaching in and removing a quantity of twigs. A grey furry blur flew out so fast that I couldn’t really know it was a squirrel until it hit the forest floor 15 feet below. I realized there was another one in there too, so opened the trap door rather than insert my hand again. Number two disappeared just as fast, with no apparent injury from the fall.
Here’s a video clip from the six color photos dated January 8th. The four-second pause on each corresponds to the camera’s four-second pause between each shot. Warning: there’s not much to see here: Squirrels briefly visible, coming or going

Conclusions:
1. Clearly at 15 feet distant, the camera is too far away from the nesting box. There is a tree five feet closer, but it would have the camera pointing west instead of north.
2. The camera’s infra-red functionality seems inadequate for the current 15-foot distance. The early morning and late afternoon shots in black-and-white aren’t of much use.
2. The camera’s motion-detector seems to be tripped by the motion of the trees in the wind. (When we trained the camera last fall on bird feeders hung from wires, we got many pictures of swinging but unattended feeders.)

About the nesting box itself, see Projects, above.