TRAVIS COUNTY, Texas (KXAN) — Did you know that the Eastern Screech Owl is Travis Audubon’s bird of 2025?
KXAN viewer Andrew Levihn-Coon recently sent KXAN several of pictures of the owls, which he photographed last month.
The birds that Levihn-Coon photographed were a mated pair near their nest, he said. One of the owls had a rare reddish-brown, or rufous, coloration. Typically, Eastern Screech Owls in Central Texas adapted a grey coloration for better camouflage with the region’s trees.
“So I was photographing them, that it was actually kind of a week later that baby fledged and left. So they were there for about a month,” Levihn-Coon said. “The male would kind of watch the nest all day, so he often is super camouflage, and would sit on the branch about 10 to 15 away, feet away from the nest, always with a line of sight to kind of watch over the nest.”
He spotted the birds at near the Tom Hughes Park at Lake Travis. Typically, the birds nest between March and mid-June, with some nesting until July, according to the Cornell Lab’s website…