Happy Owloween!

For Halloween this year I wanted to let my birder and naturalist colors fly. So instead of the usual face on my pumpkin, I decided to carve something appropriately spooky but more from the natural world.

I started a Pinterest board to collect patterns and ideas. Let me tell you, there are some seriously talented pumpkin carvers out there! I found a lot of very intricate patterns-- gorgeous, but I knew I needed to be less ambitions. So I kept looking for something simpler.

I admired lots of bat silhouettes, cats, and spiders before finally spotting a lovely silhouette of an owl with full moon. It looked like getting the exact angle of the shoulders might be tricky, but was still a simple enough shape that I might have a chance at success. I found it in a DIY Network article pin-- the art itself is copyright Paper & Pigtails for DIY Network. I saved the image and resized it to fit my already-purchased pumpkin.

Once I had the size right, I created a stencil by razoring out the negative space. Next I taped the stencil onto my hollowed-out pumpkin and traced the design on with a marker.

I ended up using two knives to carve this pumpkin. One large one for cutting the top off the pumpkin and for taking out big chunks in the design, then a smaller one for finer details and better shaping, like to get my moon actually round, and to refine my owl's eartufts.

I ended up omitting a few details that were too intricate for my knife skills. But I think I came pretty close, and my owl is definitely still recognizable!

My freshly carved pumpkin

The next day, the owl had started to tip over outside of the pumpkin, so we fastened it to the side with a toothpick.  This is something I would note for future carvers-- the tenuousness of the carved owl's connection to the rest of the pumpkin. You may want to strengthen or reinforce the owl right away, rather than wait for it to fall over first.

I liked the design so much I took the stencil and also used it as a Halloween window decoration. We put it behind purple tissue paper and shone a flashlight on it to create this look:

The purple glow is very spooky, don't you think?

I do have one thing to admit, however. Although I love eating crunchy roasted pumpkin seeds, the last few years I've saved my pumpkins' seeds with the intention of roasting them. But then weeks later I still haven't done it,  and the seeds have grown mold in my fridge. Blech! So this year I decided to skip the moldy fridge step and dump all the seeds and pulp into my compost bin. Who knows, maybe next summer one of the seeds will sprout and I'll have volunteer pumpkins by next Halloween!

Cool facts about Great Horned Owls, the species I think is depicted here:

• They eat skunks! This owl's poor sense of smell actually benefits it when time comes to make dinner from a pungent skunk. It's even been reported that some of these owls leave the smell of a skunk behind on remnants of other prey. 
• They nest very early in the season. If you live in Great Horned Owl territory and appropriate habitat, you could try putting up a nesting box for these large owls in your back yard. The Nestwatch project from Cornell Lab of Ornithology offers plans for building and posting one if you're interested. 
• Often, though, a Great Horned Owl pair just takes over an old nest built by another species, as did the pair that I saw in Boyd Hill Nature Preserve, St. Petersburg, Florida last year. (I included the nest in my year-end eBird wrapup post.)

Stay tuned for my attempts to turn the pumpkin into a set of bird and squirrel feeders.