CAROL LINNITT/THE NARWHAL
in part because its four bonded pairs
are slow to reproduce.
Spotted owls usually mate for life,
but courtship in captivity can stretch
over years. Females are choosy about
their mates. Shania, the first chick
born in the program in 2008, to par-
ents Einstein and Shakkai, spurned the
first two males that staff placed in her
adjoining aviary.
Only after two years of sharing space
with her third suitor, a young dom-
inant male named Scud, did Shania
finally accept his advances. At first
the owls sat beside each other like shy
teenagers at a school dance, and
preened each other’s feathers. Later,Scud brought Shania mice and rats
from his feeding tray to demonstrate
his provisioning skills. When Shania
finally accepted his prey delivery staff
knew they were on track. They grew
even more excited when they saw Sha-
nia pulling belly feathers in prepara-
tion for incubating an egg. The bonded
pair is now the centre’s most produc-
tive, producing fertilized eggs that
hatched in 2016 and 2017.
Hoping to increase owls’ sperm
counts, the centre once fed selenium-
rich sardines to rodents bred at the
centre—but it was ineffective. Veter-
inarians have even pruned feathers
from the captive females’ vents—theOwl eggs are kept for
32 days in temperature-
controlled incubators.rd.ca 87