[Bristol-Birds] THREE familiar owlets in an art gallery window

From: "Wallace Coffey" <jwcoffey@xxxxxxxxxx>
To: "Bristol-birds" <bristol-birds@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 14 Dec 2011 21:11:33 -0500




















 Yes!  You can imagine my double take when I saw this photo on
 display and for sale in the window of an art gallery on State Street
 in Bristol Tennessee while I was Christmas shopping this afternoon.

 All of the promotion about the gallery states art and photos by local
 artists, etc.  

 When, where and how ?  Those were the quick questions racing
 thru my mind as I inquired inside about the photo called "Owlets"
 for sale in the front window.

 The shop keeper said it was an original photograph taken by
 Kaylynn Wilster of Piney Flats, TN.......hmmmm ?

 After a bit of wondering thru the beautiful and varied art in
 the business, which is called the "606 State Street Galley," the
 store keeper said it was a co-op gallery with unique works
 of over 40 regional artists. I actually new a lot of them and some
 have been personal friends for 20 years or more.

 So she telephoned Kaylynn Wilster to her cell phone and reached
 her.  I was handed the store phone.

 The photo was made by Kaylynn on Roan Mountain.  She called
 it a "setup" photo and said she was taken to see the owls and
 get the photos by a fellow she knew but she couldn't remember
 who he was.

 Was he from Bristol, I asked.

 She didn't remember.

 Was he a graduate student at ETSU, I prompted.

 "Yes!  Yes!" she said. "Yes.  I remember, now, he was from
Bristol!" 

 "Now I remember, his name was Mark Barb," she said with
delight. She said they were young from an owl box he had put up
on the mountain.  He was taking the owlets down from the box
and weighing and measuring them, etc.  They were placed on a
small limb as the setup for the photo.

She had gotten to know Mark while she worked with a vet practice
in Jonesborough.  

Neither one of us said Northern Saw-whet Owls but I knew what
they were.  I didn't know if she would know what kind of owls they
were and she didn't offer to say.  She was not defensive but was
interested in my interest.

From 1993 until 1995, ETSU graduate student Mark Barb placed 
16 nest boxes on Roan Mountain, which produced five confirmed 
nests.

His graduate thesis was "Natural history of the Northern Saw-Whet
Owl in Northeast Tennessee."

This was not all strange.  I remember the windy, weekend day when
four of us, responded to a phone call from Barb while we were in
Damascus, VA.  We turned on a dime and went straight to Carvers Gap
on Roan Mountain to meet Barb who had promised to show us an
active nest of the tiny owl.  We arrived to meet Dr. Matthew Rowe of
Appalachian State University of Boone, NC who was there to get
DNA samples with a graduate student, Dana Tamashiro, who earned
a MS in Dec. 1996 for her genetic and morphological variation 
studies of the Northern Saw-whet Owl in Eastern North America.

But surely you can see the similarity of the photo in the Bristol gallery
window to that of a photo published in The Birds of Northeast
Tennessee (Second Edition) on page 60.  It caught my attention.
I am very familiar with the FOUR owlets Knight photographed in Aug
1992 at a nest box on Unaka Mountain -- the first documented nesting 
of the species in Tennessee. 

No link whatsoever between Knight's photo and Wilster's photo in
the store window but it made me stop and be certain who this
Kaylynn S. Wilster was and what she might know about Saw-whets
that we might not otherwise know.

Let's go birding. . . .

Wallace Coffey
Bristol, TN
[Bristol-Birds] THREE familiar owlets in an art gallery window

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