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The birds weigh about as much as a bar of soap.
That’s how Melissa Boyle Acuti describes the northern saw-whet owl, the smallest owl species found in Maryland and one of the smallest in North America. They’re hardly bigger than a fist with a ping pong ball on top, she adds.
During the fall in Edgewater, Maryland, a small group of volunteers helps catch and band these little owls from sunset to midnight. They’re participating in Project Owlnet, an initiative that seeks to learn more about these birds and their migration and that supports an ever-expanding network of migrant owl banding stations.
Boyle Acuti is the banding station manager for Project Owlnet’s site at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC) in Edgewater. She leads the participants through the project’s processes.
The group uses an audio lure to entice the birds, capturing them in mist nets to bring back to the banding station. Once there, they place aluminum bands on the birds—“friendship bracelets for science,” as they’re called within the project. Project participants also measure the owls’ bills, wings and tails.
They use a blacklight to look at the underside of the owls’ wings and see their molt pattern, which helps determine their ages, a difficult task. Old feathers don’t glow as brightly under the light because the pigment has faded, while new feathers have a brighter glow, Boyle Acuti says.
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And how do the owls behave during all of this?
“We definitely get beak snapping at times,” Boyle Acuti says, though most of them are fairly docile, she adds—their usual behavior is to sit and look camouflaged, after all. “I feel like there are times, during migration especially, it seems some of them are like ‘Hey, I got places to go, I don’t have time for this.’ But I might just be anthropomorphizing them.”
Dave Brinker, one of the project’s founders, alongside Scott Weidensaul and Steve Huy, says that the start date of the project is noted as 1994, but it began casually before then.
“It kind of grew organically out of attempts to get other bird banders to start banding saw-whets,” Brinker says. “Once it was really starting to do well, people said ‘Well when did you start this?’ We looked back and we kind of picked 1994 as a good point to say ‘Yeah we were pretty serious about it roughly then.’”
Project Owlnet has banding stations around the United States and Canada. The data the teams collect may help to tell the story of the species’ behaviors and migration patterns. The future of migration tracking is the Motus system, Boyle Acuti says, which uses nanotag tech to track birds, bats and insects. Motus’ project No. 753 pertains to northern saw-whet owls. Workers put Motus radio tags on the owls, and when the birds pass by specialized receiving stations, the creatures’ travels are revealed.
“The perception was that it was a rare bird,” Brinker says. “With what we’ve done with Project Owlnet and things over the years here, we’ve kind of flipped it on its head. The way you need to present it is: It’s a rarely observed or rarely seen bird.”
These birds are good at being hidden, and they must be to survive, both Brinker and Boyle Acuti say, because anything larger than them is a potential predator. “They’re here, but they’re not calling attention to themselves,” she says. “I think the most fascinating thing is how many of them potentially are around our area, and nobody really knows about them.”
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In recent years, one saw-whet did achieve high profile status: Rocky, an owl that was rescued from the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree in New York City, treated at a wildlife rehabilitation site and later released in 2020. Rocky’s story led to multiple books and merchandise.
She was discovered hidden among the tree’s branches, typical for the life of a saw-whet. The owls tend to live around five to eight years, according to Boyle Acuti.
“They nest and summer up in these boreal forests in Canada,” she says. “Those areas, people can’t get to very easily. … So that’s why the fall migration studies are really important to know what’s happening with the population of owls.”
For Christmas bird counts, the owls may be found down in their southern range, possibly showing up at stations in Georgia, Alabama and Oklahoma. “They go pretty far south in small numbers,” she says. “The more that we do with Project Owlnet, the more we learn about their migrations.”
Saw-whet captures have varied widely from year to year at SERC, which became a Project Owlnet banding site in 2017. That year, the team captured eight birds, and the next year, they captured 54. Then in 2019, it was six; the year after, it was 29. And then eight in 2021, 26 in 2022, nine in 2023 and ten in 2024. Notably, one of the birds banded at SERC and identified as a recently hatched owl in 2022 was recaptured nearly 600 miles away in Quebec on October 14, 2024.
Many factors may affect the owl population, Boyle Acuti notes: “You hear about the wildfires in Canada—they’ve been in the news. Even climate change, that could be causing the southern species to move more northerly. The tree species compositions, if those change, that could impact where the owls are nesting and the prey. There’s a lot we don’t know, and that’s why we study them. In order to see trends, you have to have long-term data sets.”
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As the project continues, so will the data-gathering—and so will the appreciation of saw-whets.
Brinker says when people see saw-whets for the first time, “they’re always saying, ‘Oh, that’s so cute—I didn’t know owls were so little.’” And these owls are still less known than others, as typically snowy owls, great horned owls and barred owls come to mind when people think of these nocturnal birds, he says. Most people “don’t think of a little saw-whet owl, which is really a master of concealment and hiding,” he adds.
But for the folks dedicated to Project Owlnet, as volunteers look for the birds at night during autumn in Edgewater and elsewhere, the little saw-whet is surely the main owl on their minds.
“We’ve started jokingly calling them ‘angry pinecones,’” Boyle Acuti says. “They’re not a whole lot bigger than a pinecone, to be honest—like a large pinecone. It is pretty interesting that they can be so well camouflaged.”