FALMOUTH – Maine Audubon seeks volunteers in northern and Down East Maine as well as around Jackman, Rangeley, Bethel, Bridgton and Fryeburg to conduct early morning owl surveys for the Maine Owl Monitoring Project.

These “citizen scientist” volunteers will receive a cassette tape and written training material to learn the nine possible owl species they may hear during the surveys, which run from midnight to 4 a.m.

Each volunteer is assigned an established road route, and on any night between now and April 10 will conduct a 13-minute survey at each of 10 points along the route. For the first two minutes, volunteers listen quietly for calling owls.

They then use a cassette tape player to play calls of Maine’s three most common owls, great-horned, barred and northern saw-whet, waiting between each call in order to note any responses. Citizen scientists then log information about the survey, including weather conditions, temperature and owls heard, on a data sheet that they will send to project coordinator Susan Gallo at Maine Audubon.

Gallo notes that she is always surprised by how many volunteers want to venture out in the early spring morning to listen for owls. More than 200 individuals have volunteered for the project since it began in 2002.

“It’s a beautiful time to be out, even if your eyes are bleary and your feet are freezing.” said Gallo. “And it’s such a treat to hear an owl call back to you. To hear that eerie call from the darkness and know you are doing something good for wildlife is a double reward.”

Data from the surveys is giving scientists at Maine Audubon and its project partner, the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, an idea of how many owls live in the state, which is not an easy calculation since the birds are nocturnal and breed in the winter.

The organizations hope long-term data from the project will reveal if owl populations are in fact declining, as anecdotal evidence suggests, and why large die-offs occur every few years.

Maine is the first state to organize such a project.

Anyone interested in participating may call Susan Gallo at (207) 781-2330, extension 216, or send e-mail to her at [email protected].