March is around the corner — which means it’s almost nesting season for Barred Owls!
For the second year, the Schlitz Audubon Nature Center will give people a look into the lives of Barred Owls with a nest box camera.
Lindsay Focht is the raptor program director at Schlitz Audubon, and says the live stream is part of the nature center’s Barred Owl Monitoring Project.
Lake Effect’s Xcaret Nuñez spoke with Focht for this month’s Chirp Chat to learn about the monitoring project and how people can watch online as owlets hatch this spring.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Can you tell me about Barred Owls and describe what they look like?
It's a medium to large sized owl. It is a tuftless owl, which means that it doesn't have those feather tufts on the top of its head. It's perfectly smooth. In coloration, it’s gray, whitish, with these dark vertical streaks on its chest. You can typically find Barred Owls in forested habitats, usually with older trees, they also prefer wetlands in areas that are close by a pond or some kind of standing water. Primarily because of one of their favorite food sources, which are fish and crayfish. Barred Owls also a year round resident of Wisconsin, so when they have set up a territory in our state, they stay there for almost the rest of their lives.
The Nest Box Cam went live in March 2025. How did this project come about in the first place?
The nest box camera that we live stream is actually one branch, if you will, of the Schlitz Audubon’s larger Barred Owl Monitoring Project. It’s a project that I work on with a wonderful partner, Dr. Bill Stout, and we’ve been working on that since 2021. That year we found this new pair of Barred Owls that were in an area for the first time – in the Milwaukee area – probably in decades. So we decided we have a great opportunity to study the behavior and the habits of these wild owls in an urban setting. So being able to look into this extra special secret aspect of their lives and their nesting behaviors was one thing that developed from this monitoring project. And then we found ourselves in the position where we could share it with the public last year.
I was going to ask you why you’re specifically studying Barred Owls, but it seems like the opportunity presented itself.
Yep, absolutely! And in this particular case, we're studying the habits of an owl species that there's not a lot of research done on. There is some, but especially in an urban habitat, there aren't a lot studies out there right now that are published. This gives us a great opportunity to figure out their land use, how they may change their territory size as the seasons go, their preferred diet. Also, as equally as important, how well they play nice with others. It's made a lot of headlines that out in the Northwest, that there's some issues with Barred Owls encroaching on the Spotted Owl habitat and territory. So they're trying to figure out the best way to manage that… But what they found in the Southwest is that the Barred Owl's are playing nice with their neighbors and they can cohabitate in the same areas as other raptors species. So that personally piqued my interest with ‘What do we see here in Wisconsin?’ And we found in the study for the last five years that this pair plays nice with others. They have Great Horned Owl neighbors, they have Red Tail Hawk neighbors, Cooper Hawk neighbors and everybody is doing very well.
I was wondering if you could walk me through the breeding season of a Barred Owl and what people will be able to watch from the live nest box camera.
In mid to late winter, Betty and Maverick will come together and solidify their bond — they're hooting together, duetting together, and reestablishing their territory and then checking out their nest box or cavity options. Egg laying occurs in mid-March. What'll happen is the female, in this case Betty, will occasionally stop by the cavity and check it out and kick up the substrate and make sure that it's nice and cozy. The duration of time where she's sitting will increase every day, and then suddenly, she'll leave the box and there's an egg there. Owls will lay eggs at intervals. So there's two to four days between each egg that's being laid. Those eggs are then incubated for approximately 30 days. The eggs will hatch in that same order. And in approximately another month, the young owls will fledge, or leave the cavity, and take those first very brave leaps out onto the nearby branches. So Dr. Bill Stout and I start gearing up in November and keep an eye on things, watching their behaviors and start collecting more data. And then the young owls have so far have showed us that they will disperse from their parents' home territory around July or August, giving Betty and Maverick a good four to five months to rest until next year.
So we get to see the whole process through this live stream. For 2026, we will go live when Betty (the female Barred Owl) starts to show signs of egg laying. That will be announced on our website, on our socials, and even through our e-newsletter so people can sign up so that they can get these updates of our progress with it. We will stream it all the way through when the chicks finally fledge and they have left the box.
Chirp Chat’s Bird of the Month for January
Perseus is a Barred Owl and raptor ambassador for Schlitz Audubon Nature Center. Focht says Perseus hatched in the wild in 2018, but was knocked out of her nest by a storm, and people picked her up. Because of her exposure to people at just a few weeks old, she imprinted on humans and isn’t fit to be released into the wild.
“Perseus is a medium to large Barred Owl — their coloration helps them blend in while sitting out in a tree,” Focht says. “Perseus is so fluffy, she kinda looks like a big fluffy potato. What I like to tell kids, because they can relate to it, is that our owls that stay here throughout the winter, it's like they're wearing their winter coats all year round. So that thick layer of feathers will keep them warm when it's cold out.”
