Night Of The Living Owls

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After the success of finding a Giant Rat, I felt really good about trying to now finally find a hanging parrot. Just out of Ruteng is a little village called Pagal and just beyond that is some roadside forest which is supposed to be a good site for both the Wallace's hanging parrot and the Flores green pigeon. In the morning I took a motorbike to the forest, and sure enough after only about ten minutes I found a green pigeon in the top of a tree. It was only one pigeon but one is enough, and I think a lot of people don't even find that many when on the island. I walked up the road and back for several hours but no more pigeons did I see, and no hanging parrots either. There were a number of red-cheeked parrots which are great birds that I like a lot, but of hanging parrots not a sign. Pagal was really the last chance on this trip for finding hanging parrots, so I'm going to be leaving Flores without them. Still, I saw the Giant Rat so that's half the battle won!

In the afternoon I took another motorbike to Danau Ranamese. I had planned on camping out here again for the night to look for the rat, but now I'd found one that wasn't really necessary. However there are also a couple of endemic owls in the forests by the lake so I decided to go anyway (and if I found another rat so much the better). The two owls here are the Wallace's scops owl and the Flores scops owl. The latter was only known from two specimens from 1896 until rediscovered in 1995. Marc had seen a Flores scops owl near the lake a few nights before and it had kindly perched out in the open until well into the morning allowing him to get some fantastic daylight photos. It was seeing those photos of this beautiful owl that made me want to see it (I'm not a huge fan of owling normally because I usually can't find them!).

I was going to try owl-hunting in the early morning rather than evening, so I only spent a couple of hours at the lake in the evening (hearing a Wallace's scops owl but not seeing it) then retired to my tent for the night. I got up again at 3am. I didn't really want to when it came down to it, but there was a Flores scops owl calling persistently from somewhere in the vicinity which eventually drew me out into the chill of the early morning. That owl was off in the jungle out of reach so I headed out to the road and walked uphill in the direction of Ruteng for about an hour to the place where Marc had photographed his owl. I heard another Wallace's scops owl on the way but it wasn't close enough to the road to be any good. At Marc's site I waited around for a couple of hours but no owls were even calling so I returned the way I'd come. Just at the concrete wall overlooking the lake a Wallace's scops owl flew across the road and over the wall.I rushed round behind it but the owl had vanished into the trees. I could hear it calling from down the slope but couldn't get to it. I saw it though, so that's good for me.

The other interesting thing that happened that morning was just by Marc's owl site, when something fairly largish dashed off the side of the road into the forest. I didn't see it but the sudden noise in the darkness gave me a heck of a fright! There happened to be a little trail right there, so I stepped inside and the whatever-it-was started hissing violently from the undergrowth. I still couldn't see it and I was a bit wary of what might happen if I tried to approach too close given the vicious sound it was making. I've never heard a macaque make those kind of noises and they should have all been asleep up in the tree-tops at that time of the morning anyway, so I think it may have been a giant rat. Its worth noting that in 2009 I was told that the giant rat can be dangerous when hunted because of its large teeth and savage disposition when defending itself. Whatever it really was, I never got to see it before it vanished into the night.

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Comments

[Peter Ericsson]

torch
Do you have a good torch? I got one of those small LED ones. They are so much better then the older types.

[Scary Israel]

I have a small LED torch, an LED headlamp, and a big LED torch (750 lumens; lights up like car headlights!). Much better than my old Dolphin torch, and much easier to put in my pack. Sucks the batteries dry super-quick though!