Date: 6/3/26 3:46 pm From: Jason Hoeksema <jason.hoeksema...> Subject: [BIRDWG01] stray N. Saw-whet Owl in Mississippi?
On the night of May 27, around 10:15pm on my property in Lafayette County, Mississippi (mixed hardwood and pine forest), I heard a distinct "toot" song that sounded like a small owl: Repeated, clear, single notes on a consistent pitch, faster than one note per second, in bouts of maybe 15-30 seconds, several different times over the course of a few minutes. I was walking the dog, with no recording equipment on hand.
On May 29th it made another appearance around the same time of night. It was fairly distant, down the slope into the forest, but I managed to grab a short (~5-second) recording with my iPhone before walking down the hill to try to get closer. In retrospect, I should have stayed put and obtained a longer recording of a full song bout, but oh well. It was moving away around the shore of the lake, and I couldn't catch up. I was able to filter the recording to bring out the "toots" enough for the average person to hear them above the frog cacophony: https://macaulaylibrary.org/asset/658707703
It made one more appearance on the evening of 5/30, around 8:15pm (just after dark), coming from a somewhat different part of the property. Again, it was fairly distant, and moved away before a group of us could get close enough for a better recording (much less a sighting).
Compared to Northern Saw-whet recordings I've listened to, the pitch is lower than average and the cadence slower than average, but I believe it's within the range of variation? Acoustically, the fit with Saw-whet seems better to me than with (Rocky Mtn) Northern Pygmy-Owl, which is pretty consistently slower in cadence.
Saw-whet also seems much more likely than N. Pygmy, as Saw-whets winter in Mississippi in small numbers, and breed in the southern Appalachians, as close as ~500km away. I've sent the recordings to birder friends who live in places where Saw-whets occur frequently, and all but one said it sounded fine for N. Saw-whet. One friend passed around the recording at the Acadia Birding Festival in Maine, and no one could think of anything else it might be.
One friend in Michigan had an interesting idea, speculating that it could be a rare call of Eastern Screech-Owl, which does occasionally "toot", apparently. I found this one example on the Macaulay Library: https://macaulaylibrary.org/asset/338545761 But: I haven't heard any typical vocalizations of Eastern Screech-Owl on the property in several years, and this tooting was not a short one-off (like you might expect for a rare Screech-Owl vocalization), but rather multiple bouts repeated several times on multiple evenings. Eastern Screech seems unlikely to me for those reasons.
So: Do you think it's a Northern Saw-whet Owl, based on the recording and associated information? Or something else?
