Northern saw-whet owl Catskill spruce
— — the smallest owl in the eastern woods, holding still.
Not only on a wall.
“A palm-sized owl in a red spruce, eight inches tall, perched flush to the trunk on a ridge above 3,500 feet. The northern saw-whet keeps to the boreal cap of the Catskills the rest of New York lost when the last ice sheet pulled north. Most people who hear one on a March night never see it. Hikers on the Slide Mountain trail walk under them by the dozen and never know.
Northern saw-whet owl Catskill spruce, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The northern saw-whet owl, Aegolius acadicus, breeds across the boreal cap of North America and reaches its southern Appalachian limit in the high Catskills of Ulster County, New York. In summer the bird holds to the balsam fir and red spruce that cover the top 500 feet of Slide Mountain, Cornell, and Wittenberg, the last island of subalpine forest in the eastern half of the state. The species is fully nocturnal, weighs about three ounces, and stands eight inches tall.
The Catskill spruce-fir cap is one of the quietest forests in the state. Wind dies inside the trees and the floor is needle-deep moss; voices carry strangely or not at all. The saw-whet calls a single repeating toot, roughly twice a second, from late February through April, and a hiker who stops walking for a full minute on a still March night can hear one from a quarter mile off. By daylight the bird becomes wood. Banders at the Cape May and Braddock Bay stations catch thousands each fall on migration through New York.
Breeding territory is set by March, with eggs laid in old woodpecker holes, often in dead red spruce snags, through April. By October the high-elevation birds drift south and join the broader migration that the Project Owlnet network tracks across more than 125 banding stations in eastern North America. Slide Mountain summit, the highest point in the Catskills at 4,180 feet, sits in their core New York breeding band. Snow holds on the ridge into late April.