Northern Saw-Whet Owls
By: Isiah
The Northern Saw-Whet Owl, one of the cutest owls in North America, is more secretive than a first glance reveals. Like many birds, they are thought to migrate during winter months, but unlike other birds, their path is a little more obscure.
To better understand these creatures, experienced scientists and citizen scientists began to band Saw-Whet owls. Bird banding, where a metal ID band is placed by a trained bander around a bird’s leg, serves many purposes for the scientific community. When banded, the bander records the owl’s weight, height, wingspan age, and time that the owl was caught. In this way, banding can function as a tracker of sorts, determining where an owl has moved. The owl’s age can also be determined. If an owl that was caught in a prior year is caught later, the age of the owl is found.
Banding has revealed peculiar phenomena associated with Northern Saw-Whets. First, only around 1% of the owls caught and banded were males. This may show that males either do not migrate, or that the male’s spring call used to attract the owls to capture nets only attract female owls. Second, the owl’s migration patterns seem to be erratic and irregular, with owls sometimes moving large distances and other times not, suggesting that their “migration” may instead be mass wandering and not true migration. Either way, the more owls that are banded, the more we can protect and learn about this precious species.
Pictures by Isiah
Art by Oliver
Anchored, Part Three
By: Ben
April 10th, 2036. 41 million miles from Earth
Nisha’s report did not convince NASA to let them return to earth early. They still haven’t found the object that NASA saw, and Cricket was growing more and more sure that it wouldn’t be a chunk of ice.
None of the crew had managed to take pictures of the creatures that had killed the two crew members in the submarine, so Cricket had to go off their memory. They did have pictures of the other creatures in the depths, however. It was much easier to describe those.
For their last day on Keto, Nisha wanted a crew to get samples of the ice crust and plants on it and make sure the rocket could make it out with relative ease. Cricket was ordered to stay in their room, and work on the reports. Nisha seemed worried about them.
Around 17:45, the team designed to take samples and secure an escape route returned. All of them had made it back with no injuries. Cricket noticed that most of the Aliens stayed far away from the crust. The only reason they could think that the aliens would have this behavior would be the flowers, but that didn’t seem right.
April 11th, 2036. 41 million miles from Earth
T-minus one hour till launch. One hour until Cricket was away from this deadly asteroid. Nisha had arranged everything to be ready to launch ahead of time, just in case.
Unfortunately, none of the crew members, or NASA, had accounted for the ice. Yesterday the team sent to the ice crust had made a hole big enough to let the rocket through, but the ice had re-sealed the hole. They had only realized this five minutes ago. Everyone on base took a diving suit and any tool they could find to help clear the ice. Cricket grabbed a hammer.
As they swam to the icy crust, they were again reminded by the absence of aliens near the crust. It was odd, but Cricket didn’t have time to worry about that. Even though everyone on base was helping, it would still be close.
Jonathan was the first to notice something was wrong.
“I see something!” He pointed to something in the distance. All Cricket could see was blue.
“I don’t see anyth-” Nisha’s sentence was cut off when the blue moved.
It was huge, bigger than anything on earth, around 130 feet long. It looked like a massive snake, expect for the fact that it lacked eyes, nose, and had a star-shaped mouth as wide as Cricket was tall. It had a ribbon-like fin that stretched from its neck to its tail, with scars and rips across it. Cricket thought it was beautiful.
Continued in the next issue of The TABloids…
The Teen Advisory Board of the Library is made up of a variety of teens aged 12-18 that meet once a month to discuss all things library. They develop events and curate different displays for the teen lounge. To learn more about TAB information and an application form can be found on the Library website. Visit the Teen Advisory Board application page.
