Owls Who Give a ‘Toot’ Can’t Beat the Band : Northern saw-whet: Unlike larger varieties, they don’t ‘hoot’; they ‘beep, beep, beep.’ The birds, which weigh about as much as a large robin, get banded for science.

Kevin Dodge traded an evening at his friend’s wedding reception for a late-night date with an owl.

His friends understood.

They know Dodge’s passion for the tiny Northern saw-whet owl. He has spent many a cold night netting them and attaching aluminum bands to their legs to learn about their migration.

“It’s really neat to work on something that nobody knows about because whatever you learn, it’s a contribution,” said Dodge, director of the Natural Resources and Wildlife Technology Program at Garrett Community College.

The owl banding station, in an old shed near Bittinger, is one of only about a dozen in the United States. In the last three years, Dodge and students from the college and nearby universities have caught and banded 263 saw-whet owls.

The white, tan, gray and black-feathered owls stand up to 8 inches tall and weigh about as much as a large robin. They breed as far north as Canada and winter throughout all but the extreme southern sections of the United States.

They are not nearly as large as the more commonly known Barred Owl or the large Great Horned Owl often seen on Halloween posters. These larger owls eat unwary saw-whets.

And these owls don’t hoot like the larger owls. They toot.

On a clear, cold night recently in a grove of spruce and hemlock, a tape-recorded saw-whet breeding call pierced the silence: “beep, beep, beep.”

“Basically, it just sounds like a garbage truck backing up,” Dodge said.

The car-battery-powered tape recorder and speakers are placed near 12-foot-high nets that stretch 250 feet across the ground. The owl flies in to investigate the noise and gets caught like a shuttlecock in a badminton net.

Danny Quinn, a 27-year-old former Garrett Community College student now studying wildlife biology at West Virginia University, was in charge of checking the nets from dusk to midnight. He checked the nets at 7 p.m., 8:30 p.m. and again at 10 p.m. No owls.

Each time, he went back to doing homework on a makeshift plywood desk in the corner of the shed, kept warm by a rusty wood furnace. More students were to arrive at 3 a.m. to check the nets until sunrise.

At midnight, Quinn, Dodge, Scott Merrill and two bird enthusiasts from Frederick trekked a few hundred yards to the nets. A full moon illuminated the path and made the frost on the ground glisten.

“We got one!” shouted Merrill, a 22-year-old Frostburg State University student.

The tiny owl hanging upside down in the net was soon in the spotlight of several flashlights. Quinn spent the next several minutes untangling the bird from the net. After it was freed, the team dropped the owl into a white mesh bag and zipped it shut.

Quinn weighed the owl, a female, attached a leg band issued by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and measured her wings and feathers.

“They have amazing eyes. They are fixed in their sockets and they have this exorcist thing,” Dodge said as he swiveled its head around so the owl stared squarely at its tail.

He looked in her wing pit to check for fat, looked in her eyes and took note of fringe edging her feathers that helps muffle the sounds of flight.

After a 30-minute examination, the owl was released. She flew silently into a nearby cherry tree and hopped from branch to branch.

Dodge, an assistant professor of biology and wildlife, said researchers believe the birds winter in the South in conifer forests. But they really don’t know for sure.

“We want to get more people banding, especially down South, so we know where our birds go,” he said.

So far, the Bittinger banding station has recaptured only three owls banded in other parts of the country. They were from Duluth, Minn.; Green Bay, Wis., and Whitefish Point, Mich., Dodge said.

“People may have heard of conservation and biodiversity, but because this bird is nocturnal, small and seldom seen, it’s forgotten,” said David Brinker, a state wildlife ecologist. “Yet, it needs suitable winter habitat and suitable places to stop during migration. If somebody didn’t decide to work on the species, it could be lost.”

Brinker himself runs a saw-whet banding station on Assateague Island, a barrier island on Maryland’s Atlantic coast. The only other banding project in Maryland is near Wye Mills where a wildlife biologist has stretched a few nets behind his house.

Other saw-whet banding stations in the United States are in Cedar Grove and Linwood Springs, Wis.; Cape May, N.J.; Braddock Bay, near Rochester, N.Y., and Nine Mile Point, near Oswego, N.Y.; Cape Charles, Va.; Hawk Ridge, Minn., near Duluth; Little Suamico, Wis., near Green Bay, and Whitefish Point, Mich.

Other stations on the Great Lakes are at Thunder Bay, Long Point, Point Pelee and Prince Edward Point, all in the Canadian province of Ontario.