When I moved to Orono from West Old Town at the beginning of June, I did so with the regret that I’d be seeing and hearing a lot fewer birds. After all, how could living on the busy Kelley Road compare to living on six private, mostly wooded acres backed by University of Maine Conservation land?

It doesn’t compare, but not in the way I expected.

Shortly after I moved, I talked with a co-worker who lives down the road from me. She told me she’d been hearing barred owls hooting regularly, and had once even seen one perched in a giant, old white pine tree in the back of her property.

Sure enough, I began hearing the owls. Sometimes it was just one, but often it was answered by another, and the two would hoot, holler and caterwaul to each other for half an hour or more.

You may wonder at my description above – most people expect the standard “hoot” from an owl. But barred owls seem to make a specialty out of the variety of calls they can generate.

A barred owl’s typical call consists of a series of eight hoots, phonetically represented as, “Who cooks for you, who cooks for you all?” The last hoot is often long-drawn and quavering, abruptly dropping in pitch: “ALL-llllll.” Sometimes it is the only hoot voiced by the owl, and it sounds like a tremulous, laughing whinny.

At other times, the owls will increase the tempo of their hoots, while abbreviating the entire phrase somewhat. At these times they sound like very excited, slightly demented monkeys hollering at each other. When two owls begin calling like this, it is often a mated pair teaming up to answer an interloper’s challenge, and, in fact, I did at times hear a third owl calling.

Hearing the owls call like this from a distance is one thing. Up close is another. I remember doing the Maine Owl Survey one year and having two owls fly in to challenge the tape-recorded owl they were hearing on my boom box. It was pretty darned intimidating having owls holler at me from close range like that.

Anyway, the Orono owls serenaded me almost every night for several weeks after I moved in to my new apartment.

Birds make their presence known during the day, too. Red-eyed vireos, northern parula warblers, yellow-rumped warblers, eastern phoebes, goldfinches, northern cardinals and robins can all be heard from my apartment window. The woman whose apartment I rent, Mary Knowlton, actually owns several acres that I’m led to understand abut Orono Land Trust property. There are miles of trails that I’m free to hike, all encompassing good bird habitat. A walk along these trails, or along the Nature Trail in the nearby Dirigo Pines development, yields hermit thrushes, veeries, black-throated green warblers, white-throated sparrows and eastern pewees, to name just a few.

Right now, the only birds I’m missing are hummingbirds and raptors, but I have a feeling it won’t be that way for long.

BDN bird columnist Chris Corio can be reached at bdnsports@bangordailynews.net