Harrowing footage: Owls take out Northern cardinal and bluebird in a nest box

A group of live webcams documented a pair of Eastern screech owls in Murrysville preying on a Northern cardinal at a feeder and plucking a mother bluebird from a nest box within the past week.

Capturing the predatory birds in the act on a webcam is a relatively new phenomenon, according to Cornell Lab of Ornithology, which operates nature webcams with millions of viewers around the world.

“That footage is harrowing,” said Robyn Bailey, NestWatch project leader for the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. The video documented “something I think few people are likely to see in their lifetime.”

The Cornell lab has footage from earlier this year of a screech owl catching a flying squirrel in the middle of the night at a Cornell bird feeding station outfitted with a webcam, said Ben Walters, bird cams specialist at the lab.

PixCams in Murrysville, best known for its Pittsburgh Hays eagle webcam, has 25 webcams, including ones on private property in Murrysville.

“Since we have so much of the property wired with livestreaming cams in both the screech owl nest boxes, bluebird boxes (both inside and outside views) and the bird feeder cams, we’ve really been able to follow these screech owls around this year and see some amazing events,” said Bill Powers, owner of PixCams.

The bluebirds in the Murrysville nest box were on their second brood of the season and had five chicks a week old before the owl attack, Powers said.

He identified the screech owls in the videos as being the same ones that used nesting boxes on family property.

Screech owls are opportunists that will eat any small bird, frogs, insects, earthworms and more, Walters said. “They hunt for whatever is available, and they are not too picky.”

There are modifications for nest boxes to prevent predators from entering, he added.

The webcams are amazing tools for discovery for the public and researchers, Walters said.

“Although nature is magical, wonderful and beautiful, there are harsh realities that come into play with webcams,” he said. “It’s a bird-eat-bird world for many of those smaller nesters.”

Webcams are not just for the public’s viewing pleasure, he said. For example, Cornell partners with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to operate cameras monitoring the critically endangered California condor, Walters said.

Although the owl and bluebird footage is disturbing, Bailey said, cavity-nesting birds such as bluebirds enjoy high nesting success.

Bailey has seen footage of scrub jays out West perching in nest box holes and reaching their beaks in to grab nestlings. House sparrows will evict other birds from a nest box they want to take over. Bailey added she has heard about great-horned owls repeatedly visiting purple martin colony-nesting structures to pilfer nests.

Powers rescued the five bluebird chicks and took them to Humane Animal Rescue of Pittsburgh’s Wildlife Rehabilitation Center in Verona.