A barred owl piqued the interest of wildlife students after making the Iowa State campus its home in late January.
Etienne Pienaar, a graduate student in fisheries biology, first spotted the owl by the bus stop at Lagomarcino Hall.
“I had to do a double-take because at eye level, I thought it was one of those plastic owls that people put next to a barn to keep pigeons away,” Pienaar said. “Then it blinked at me, so I just sat there and looked at it and then it eventually flew away.”
A different group of students first discovered the owl hunting outside of Science Hall II.
“The first time we spotted the owl was not in Lago, but outside of Science II and then it moved there,” Hunter Wells, a graduate student in wildlife ecology, said. “It was actively hunting at that point and going into the trees. Barred owls will hunt small mammals, so we saw it hunting some young squirrels, but it’ll also hunt things like chipmunks, meadow voles and mice.”
Wells said the area surrounding Lagomarcino Hall makes a great living space for barred owls.
“There’s a lot of canopy, considering it’s not a forest, so it’s enclosed and safe,” Wells said. “Lago also has holes where the drainage pipes are and owls will roost in those. Then, it’ll go out and hunt the prairie and the side grasses when it gets dawn or dusk.”
Barred owls live in trees and are known to nest, lay eggs and raise their children inside of a tree’s hollow structure or cavity, according to Wells.
“Barred owls are cavity nesters, so they’ll find the big holes in trees and that is where they will build nests, like on top of the canopies of trees,” Wells said.
After several weeks of documenting the owl, Robin Deisig, a graduate student in wildlife ecology, named the owl “Beans.”
“I claimed Beans because it had been a couple weeks where we were steadily seeing them,” Deisig said. “I was like ‘Oh, the owl hangs out in the courtyard by the Starbucks,’ so I was like, ‘Coffee beans.’”
Although the group has not seen Beans around Lagomarcino Hall lately, Wells believes the owl has a nest in another location and is raising a family.
“Probably at this point, Beans has fully mated and is probably taking care of a nest, which is why we haven’t been actively seeing them,” Wells said.
Kristi Brede, a graduate student in wildlife ecology, noted that Beans seemed comfortable around people.
“Beans is very comfortable in the sense that they were doing natural behaviors with numbers of people standing around,” Brede said. “There were also times you could walk underneath them and nobody realized they were walking above their hole.”
Brede said that people and wild animals together are potentially a bad mix, but seeing people pay attention to Beans was a cool experience.
“As somebody who works with birds and knows ecology and how animals and people mix, at times it was scary,” Brede said. “It is really cool that there were a bunch of different people getting to experience nature that might not usually get to.”
Wells credits Iowa State’s campus layout and landscaping for giving students access to nature.
“I think we’re very lucky that Iowa State has beautiful trees and landscaping that allows students to have that experience with nature while walking between classes,” Wells said. “People that had to come to Lago for classes and Beans got a group for a while where people came to visit and say hello. I think it’s good networking, where you can go with other students and see where the deer are laying down for the night.”