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From Rendy Shuya
Camouflaged Burrowing Owl - Aug 2026 - Alberta, Canada
Where is the owl? And why does the gravel have eyes?!
None of your business! And to see all those tasty bugs hopping and flying around!
😉
10:30 the other night, I go out in my yard and there's the Wurster kid, looking up in the tree! I say "What are you looking for?" And he says "I'm looking for my burrow owl!"
Jumpin' Jesus on a pogo stick! Everybody knows the burrow owl lives in a hole in the ground! Why the h*ll do you think they call it a burrow owl, anyway!?
I like you Stuart.
You're not like the other people in the trailer park...
But for everyone else! Here is your periodic reminder than Burrowing Owls are at least as good at flying as any other owl, and they do enjoy being in trees. Though largely diurnal and/or crepuscular, so still likely not out at 10:30PM as in the song, they can regularly be found in the boughs throughout most of the rest of the day.
Now I'm listening to all the Dead Milkmen albums I have. Filet of Soul baby!
It was always urban legend that one of them went to my high school, and he was the only close to famous person to ever come out of our school...
Ah, here we go, verified. The drummer.
Wicked! I went to the same HS as Joe Perry and the band Extreme. As an old school punker your story is far cooler.
That is pretty cool too!
That burrow owl is a DAREDEVIL! I hope he/she has enough sense not to stick it head out of the "Mixer"
But thats cool, I know very little about them other than the song. Never seen one in real life, but thats prolly because they are camouflagey and no where near where I live.
Great horns, Barred, Screech, Barn are pretty common if your outdoorsy here in the Northeast/Mid
I've been to a few places that had them, but the only one I ever caught out of its burrow was at the National Aviary in Pittsburgh, and he looked very mad I caught him! It gave me such a dirty look.
I wanted to go see them in Florida when I was there in the fall, but I ran out of time, it was pretty far from where we were. Next time...
Shit I spent a month in the woods in FLA and never saw one. Wild boar, deer, coyotes, gators, osprey, and a few great horned/barn owls. No burrows :(
We did hear a Panther one night, it was scoping out our camp. They cry like a human baby its creepy AF at 0300 in the middle of the night in Ocala state forest.
Other than that I loved that trip.
Ooo that sounds like a good adventure!
I wanted to go to Cape Coral to see them. They're readily accessible to see, and they have maps of the burrows. I hear the public library is the best place to go. The city seems to take great pride in them and do a lot to keep them safe and undisturbed.
I see some photos that a portion of the Florida burrowing owls have different eyes than ones anywhere else. They are also the mascot of Florida Atlantic University, though they are trying to evict a burrow to expand the dorms, which seems a bit hypocritical...
Check out "Outward Bound" they have adventures like this for all ages and all over the world. You won't regret it!
Cape Coral, I think I've been there when I was a young kid. Of course you never appreciate that until you get older, youth is wasted on the young...
I was planning a road trip, listening to Stuart, seeing a burrow owl while sucking down a cold Coors light (barf) might be my old man trifecta!
/s
But seriously look into Outward Bound, they have 3 day courses out to 6 months. I did a 30 day in Florida. We had Thanksgiving in the woods :)
Oooo....dogsledding adventure! 😄
There's some cool looking stuff there! I will have to keep this in mind. Thanks!
Most online talk I see about Cape Coral is somewhere in between meh and suburban dystopia, so it doesn't sound like it has much to offer other than the owls. This is why I didnt drag my wife the 3 hours there from Tampa where we were staying. We stuck to the Tampa ZooQuarium instead. They had some owls, no burrowing though.
And Tampa is a nice area, I lived in Sarasota for a bit. I wouldn't waste 6 hours unless on a charter boat fishing!
And they have so many adventures, they used to have was a urban camping adventure. I doubt they still have it how insane the drugs have gotten.
I did a hybrid hiking and canoeing. I'll have to dig out my journal I know the mileage was insane but we were all about 15-17 years old. I think I was the oldest. So no pain in the mornings, not like now lol
If I did it again, and I will I would do the desert or snowshoe. Something completely foreign to me.
Dog sledding does sound pretty amazing too :)
We had a really great time. We rented a convertible and drove all around in Tampa, over to everywhere between Tarpons Springs and Fort DeSoto, and took a day trip up north a bit to Panasoffkee to do the gator fan boat tour. We did take a half day fishing trip on the Gulf, but we got there during a rare cold spell, which was still nice to us coming from PA, but we caught 5 tiny fish between the 2 of us.
I'm guessing urban camping is technically illegal in a lot of places now as an anti-homeless measure. As sad as it is, learning safe urban camping skills might not be a bad thing to teach younger people as wealth inequality continues to increase and the job market gets weirder and home values keep reaching unattainable heights... 😐
I'm with you on doing something totally out there. I just took a private sailing lesson for the first time last week and that was mindblowing. Once I got shown the basics, I was shocked how instinctive and natural it felt. I thought it would be somewhat physically demanding and tricky to keep the wind, but it was so peaceful and there was so much feedback from the boat it was like it was telling me what I had to do. One of my favorite recent experiences.
Sound like it was a great trip!
As for the urban camping it was the late 80's early 90's so it was a lot simplier then for pulling off that adventure.
Sailing eh? I would love to give that a go. Not in the best place for it on the border of VA and WV. But we have great mountains and moonshine!
The other adventure I want to give a go before I'm too old is a tear drop trailer and hit all 50 states. Low dough, LP tank stove and hit the grocery stores. Planet Fitness membership to get showers and just roll for year. Spend a season in Slab City. Go live on a Res in the Dakotas (I have enough Native to qualify). Hang out w/ the Cajuns for a spell. Just soak in all that this country has to offer :)
It was our honeymoon trip, so we crammed in a lot of adventures to remember!
I enjoyed being a kid in the 80s/90s. Being a kid seems rough nowadays.
We had the sailing lesson at the widest part of the Hudson River, by the Tappan Zee Bridge. It's about 3 miles across I think he said. Having a place to do it was one of the things that delayed trying it for me for so long too. I hear WV has great whitewater, and we've taken a trip along the mountains in VA stopping at all the caves. Natural Bridge gave us their old hours on the phone, so when we showed up, they apologized and gave us a private tour of the cave since they did tell us they would be open when we were arriving.
Your camper trip sounds quite epic! I'd love to see you do it!
Well that sounds like a great honeymoon vacation!
I have never done white water in WV, I did the Ocoee River in Tennessee a bunch of times when I was living in Atlanta. That river is a blast as its man made for the 1996 Olympics so you can go mid to insane depending on the path.
Funny you mention the caverns, you were right where I live now :)
As for being a kid these days it has to suck beyond imagine. Play in the yard Karen calls the cops. 10 years old and a bunch of your friends and you want to walk to the store. Guess who's back calling the cops because she feel your too young to do anything.
Too many camera's to get you in trouble. People are completely unhinged, image playing "ding dong ditch" now days? You would get shot. Cops are over the top, so you get away with nothing.
No neighbor mechanic wrenching in the yard to teach you how to work on cars and fetch beers for him and his buddies. How I learned to be a shade tree mechanic lol. Shit paper routes are done by ADULTS now, same with dishwashers. Insane!
The angry curmudgeon is coming out to bitch that these kids can't have any fun!
It is a beautiful part of the country that I feel a lot of people overlook. I always enjoy visiting or passing through there.
My sisters-in-law have a lot of kids, and their lives just seem so locked down and programmed. They're MAGAs, so I dunno how much that has to do with it, but it seems every year I see less and less kids out playing in my neighborhood, and everyone is just on phones now or playing MMOs or whatever. I don't know enough to say it's bad, and since I don't have any kids I try not to stick my nose too far into people's business, but it seems the very opposite of my childhood.
Tangent time: I was listening to a YT vid this morning with a long time Sesame Street creator and it was about how the type of childhood Sesame Street was created for no longer exists, and how it has tried to change to accommodate the modern childhood. They talked about how in the 70s-90s (pre-mainstream net I feel is a good cutoff point) that growing as a child was about finding your place in a community, as you were out and about, learning who was around you and finding your role. Now Bluey is the most watched show by parents and children. I've watched some Bluey, and it still has some community gathering, but it's a lot more home-centric, with parents having a more active and direct role entertaining and teaching kids, whereas our parents set us free upon the neighborhood to learn from our sense of adventure and making mistakes. I'd love to have had a Bluey childhood, but one of my big concerns, especially with the rise of things like the parents' rights movement, is my childhood sucked, and to this day, I really don't like my parents. I was stuck with them wayyyy too much even with the freedom to spend most of the day outside and away from them. If I was around them every moment I wasn't at school, I probably wouldn't be here today. So I worry about kids that don't get that unsupervised time away, because that and the time with my grandparents was my only real happiness.
The other fun random thing in the video was a brief side chat about micro-generations. They said there is a large number of I believe 5-6 year olds that are having a massive problem in that they refuse to wear shoes! Having a bulk of their formative years at home due to COVID, they just never acclimated to having their feet caged up all day and refuse to keep shoes on. I found that so interesting!
this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2026
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