According to many longtime residents …… of the hood, Barred Owls had been coming to this century-old Elm tree for at least the last 35 years or so. It was always so cool to see them come, at dusk they would arrive and take a perch up in the big Elm. If you’re out in the woods and hear someone calling “who cooks for you”, you’re actually hearing the call of a Barred Owl. If you hear what sounds like maniacal laughing afterward, that’s usually two Barred Owls performing a courtship duet. Barred Owls mate for life, and they usually have a single clutch of two or three white eggs each year. So lots of family members hanging around. We never once felt threatened by them, they were just as cuirious about us as we were of them. They never exhibited any aggressive behavior towards people.In the middle of summer in 2021 the tree started shedding leaves as though it was fall. We engaged the state and they sent somebody out to take samples. We thought we had spied a Gypsy Moth so assumed it was them, but turns out they were not Gypsy Moths. A preliminary assessment by them indicated some type of fungus was the culprit. We never heard back on what the results of testing revealed. By the middle of summer the tree was completely barren. The tree was starting to lose pretty significant sized limbs anytime a strong breeze would come along. In order to be more in control of where the tree fell, we decided to cut it down in 2023. |
|
| Here is a short video that depicts the sad ending to the Elm tree. |