In the dining room of the scops owl
In the summer of 2018, as part of the Gorička krajina project, we equipped two females of the scops owl with GPS tracking devices. Gaia and Hestia, both named after Greek goddesses, wore tracking devices for a week. Every night, GPS recorded their locations at 10-minute intervals. Data were obtained after recapturing females when devices were removed.
Apparently both had mainly hunted on the edges of different habitats, e.g. between a high-trunk orchard and a meadow, a meadow and a arable land, in grassy belts between arable land, along the road edges, in the forest edge and in hedges. This is not surprising, as the scops owl always hunts from a hunting pole, like top of the tree, a shrub, a fence or a purpose-installed hunting poles. The latter, which were set up at several locations in Markovci as part of the Gorička krajina project, successfully played their role in the first season, as Gaia used them to its advantage. Statistical analysis of the collected data will be prepared in the final year of the project, in 2021, when this years females will be joined by another 18 equipped scops owls.
