Cool critters: This adorable tiny owl doesn’t give a hoot

In the Inland Northwest, tiny owls with large, cartoonish yellow eyes manage to be everywhere and nowhere.

Weighing little more than a robin, the northern saw-whet owl is a year-round resident of our region. Even if you spend a lot of time outdoors, chances are you’ve never seen one. Meanwhile, dozens of these gnome-like creatures have seen you. After decades of hoodwinking us into believing they’re rare, we now know the owls are fairly common; it’s just that they hide in plain sight.

Among the smallest owl species in North America, the saw-whet is the size of a smartphone topped with a pingpong ball. With a rounded head, bright yellow eyes and white and brown mottled feathers, it resembles a cute cuddly toy.

But when it comes to capturing rodents, the 3- to 4-ounce owl is a killing machine.

These diminutive raptors eat mostly deer mice, voles and shrews. Under the cover of darkness, they sit, wait and listen from low perches, then silently swoop down to make a quick kill with razor-sharp talons, said field biologist Hayley Madden of the Owl Research Institute in Charlo, Montana.

“They’re extremely good hunters,” Madden said.

Northern saw-whets are named for their “toot-toot-toot” call that resembles the sound of saw blades being sharpened on a whetstone, according to the National Audubon Society. These days, however, you may associate the owl’s vocalizations to the sound of a construction vehicle in constant back-up mode. Monotonous tooting notes “may go on for hours with scarcely a break,” the agency states.

And this time of year, saw-whets have plenty to say.

The owls typically toot more during March and into early April as they pair up for mating season, Madden said.

“We’re definitely hearing them in the evening, starting about 30 minutes after sunset,” she said. “They’ve already established their territory. Now the males are communicating to one another that they’re maintaining that territory.”

Males are also tooting to alert females that they would make a worthy mate.

“They’re advertising themselves as available males,” Madden added.

Interested females respond by emitting a softer, high-pitch call punctuated with whistles, according to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. To seal the deal, the male puts on a romantic courtship display by circling the female “about 20 times in flight before landing beside her and presenting her a prey item,” the ornithology website says.

Not long ago, little was known about the saw-whet owl’s courting behaviors, much less where in North America it lived. The bird was so rarely seen that it wasn’t until the 1990s that scientists revealed that they are surprisingly widespread across the upper half of the United States and southern Canada.

“These little owls have mastered the art of hiding in order to survive and rest,” Madden said. Despite the fact that they roost in vegetation just above human eye level, “I can’t guess how many times I’ve walked past one perched in a tree without spotting it,” she said.

The saw-whet’s small size and camouflaging colors help it stay out of sight, as does its preference for roosting far within dense vegetation of trees such as Douglas firs, junipers, spruce and the western larch.

They also stay still when perched. Not only are saw-whet owls preyed upon by great-horned owls, hawks and falcons, but songbirds mob them to chase them away.

If you were a tiny puff ball of feathers, you’d hide, too.