Wildlife Window: A patch of paradise always worth visiting

New experiences make revisiting old familiar places worthwhile.

Like what happened last Saturday.

I have more familiar places than I can count, but only a few stand out as favorites.

One place appeals to me for its orchid diversity; a different orchid place appeals to me not for its diversity of orchids but for the huge numbers of them. Another favorite plant place appeals to me because it supports such an incredible diversity of liverworts, mosses and ferns.

My list of such places would be long and with enough reflection could steadily grow longer, but among them all one place stands out as my favorite place among favorite places.

I first drove the Buckhorn Road in late September of 1980. It is actually Larimer County Road 44H. The lower half of the road follows along Buckhorn Creek; the juncture of Elk Creek and Box Prairie Creek becomes the headwaters for Buckhorn Creek. From there the road follows Box Prairie Creek westward to the eastern side of Pennock Pass.

And right there, in that place where a dozen trickles too small to deserve names converge to form Box Prairie Creek, I found my patch of paradise.

I visited the area on foot in May of 1981 just a week after I drove it again at a little after four o’clock in the morning.

I had spent the night searching for my favorite bird, the flammulated owl. As an undergraduate student, I had received three research grants to study that diminutive owl. The first grant helped me learn how to find them. The second and third grants helped me learn about them in their summer nesting routine.

On that May morning 42 years ago, I heard several flammulated owls calling from that place that would become my patch of paradise.

Through the 1980s I visited the place every month of the year. Though the Forest Service locked a gate across a county road when winter began, I would cross-country ski or snowshoe the road to that special place just so I could understand its full character through all the seasons.

Some years I visited the place several dozen times; some years I got there maybe a mere dozen times.

Sitting in place to study and learn about the owls, I discovered myself being watched by black bears, moose, elk, mule deer and coyotes. I encountered bats and moths and so many other mammals and insects and birds other than owls. And so many wildflowers!

Through the last four decades, I have seen six different owls — flammulated, eastern screech, great horned, northern pygmy, boreal and northern saw-whet — in that place.

Last Saturday, I added a seventh.

Sitting on a fallen aspen where I could watch a woodpecker cavity to see if flammulated owls might be nesting in it, I heard first a male flammulated owl call. After a few minutes it went silent but then a northern saw-whet owl male called for a couple minutes.

Then, a long-eared owl flew in and perched not more than 30 feet from me! A first-timer!

In 42 years of owling in that place I had never had that combination of owls in one night!

That experience of those three owl species in the same place on the same night just minutes apart confirmed my opinion.

No matter how many times I have been there, that patch of paradise is always worth visiting again.

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