Birding Through the Year: November 2022
The Branches of an Oak Tree, print, Eugène Stanislas Alexandre Bléry (MET, 49.50.361)
A Season of Owls
by David Hoyt
Spend enough time owling and it can mess with your head. You start to find the daylight hours tedious. You long for sunset, and wonder if maybe you’re becoming a vampire. You get really, really excited by a full moon. You find yourself getting creeped out in some really dark places at night, worried that you will either be murdered or arrested before you ever find your owl. And you’ve mistaken the bowl of owl pellets on the kitchen windowsill for Choco Puffs on more than one occasion.
I have indeed been spending a lot of time in the woods, mostly around dusk, and sometimes in the dark. That’s because this fall, I’ve decided to seriously look for owls in my patch.
I begin my quest as a weekend athlete might throw themselves into the gym—without much forethought and with less success. Waiting until late at night, I march down some nearby railroad tracks that run alongside the woods. I have been here many times in daylight, but never has this passageway seemed so forbidding. I am cold. There is no moon. The hair on my neck stands on end. Although it is remarkably quiet for the area, I hear nothing. Whatever is watching me this night, it remains hidden.
I enter the woods next not in the dead of night, but before sunset on a late afternoon. Owling in the fall and early winter offers one the advantage of being able to set out early, with dusk coming just before dinner. The downside is that the five o’clock hour is a busy one at O’Hare International Airport, and jets roar above with oppressive regularity. A surprising number of small propeller aircraft are also buzzing about on unfathomable errands. The noise of terrestrial traffic at rush hour seeps into the forest from all sides, punctuated by the sirens of emergency vehicles that carry on for minutes.
Despite this ceaseless racket, an owl gives its call: “Hoo—hoo—hoooo—hoo.” I am impressed at the animal’s determination to assert itself amid the general crisis of human civilization. A short moment later, I hear a shriek like something out of a nightmare. I cock my head (not all the way round and sideways, but as best I can) for better auditory reception of the next call, sure to come. It does, to the southwest. I head down the trail, which is fading in the darkness. I pass two evening power-walkers, who greet me warily. There is a lull between the roar of jets bound for Tampa, Baltimore, and London, and the owl calls again. It is a Great Horned.
He is high up. In the direction of the call, I see a familiar tree as I had never seen it before. It is one of Tolkien’s Ents of Middle Earth, standing above and apart from the rest of the forest with the authority of a sylvan god. It throws its many-elbowed arms outwards and unimpeded, tracing a pattern like the veins on a leaf or in my body. That just looks like an owl tree, I think. It has to be. That’s where he is.
The next morning, I find the tree. It is greatly reduced in majesty, though still mighty. I survey the ground for pellets, and scan the tree for roost holes. I hear nothing, and see nothing. The stage of last night’s gothic performance is empty, save for a few squirrels, mute stagehands sweeping the floorboards. My next few outings are similarly fruitless. I wonder if I am being avoided, perhaps even diverted and deceived by a cunning intellect.
I am not the only one they are deceiving. “We have owls here?” a hiker asks me on the trail late one Sunday afternoon. “Oh yes,” I replied. “The owls are our neighbors, they share this space with us.” It occurs to me that they have probably seen us many times already, silently watching us; that they may be older in age than many of the dogs that pass by. They are a top predator, preying on some of the small forest mammals that are reservoirs of Lyme disease. Where I have heard them, the forest floor is clear of invasive thickets of buckthorn, multiflora rose, and Russian olive, allowing owls to access their ground-dwelling prey. The eerie call of an owl in the woods is the vocalization of a healthy ecosystem.
A month passes, and I again enter the woods at dusk. A juvenile Red-tailed Hawk calls as it flies through the forest at mid-story, a silhouette against the pale yellow of the eastern sky. His three, gull-like calls announce the drawing of shutters and closing of gates in the evening wood. I attempt to track his flight-path along the ground, mindful of the ecological wisdom that, where there is a hawk by day, there is an owl by night.
What I hear next, I reflexively interpret as the cry of a small child. But there are no children here. It is cold and dark. I hear the same sound again, and this time it has a mechanical quality, like a rusty schoolyard swing, incongruous with the setting. Perhaps it is a stray noise from someone’s garage workshop?
No, this sound is being made by something moving through the woods, changing its position, to my left, then my right, now in front of me, now closer, though I can’t see anything moving and can’t understand how anything could move so quickly through a dark forest without making noise. It is hard for anything with legs to not make noise in the woods at night.
It is either an owl, or the Blair Witch.
It must be an owl. Or is it? And what kind? To this day, I don’t know. As if under the spell of witchcraft, Merlin wouldn’t tell me, refusing to match three successive, clear recordings, until it decided that I was hearing a Sora. I wanted to call it a Northern Saw-whet Owl, because the sound and the sonogram seemed to match. But it could have been a female Great Horned, doing her best to sound like a circular saw cutting kitchen pipe.
I return before sunset once more, and let the darkness settle around me. The shadows of deer silently move onto the meadow. It would seem that everything is ending, but in fact, it is just beginning. After an hour of nothing but a few dog owners attempting to recapture their off-leash pets before the coyotes do, I stand from my seat on a log and begin to stiffly walk home. This is crazy, I think. Who else does this? I’m an embarrassment to my family and community.
That’s when I hear my owl. He introduces himself softly. I hear him from high above, in the rafters of the forest, gradually gaining volume as he fills the sonic emptiness that is his to claim. Some animals materialize gradually out of the background when encountered; others appear all at once from nothing. Thus with my owl. A potato-shaped lump on a long, horizontal branch, perhaps eighty feet up the side of a tall oak, I notice him instantly. In profile, he resembles an insect gall on a summer leaf. He is nothing but a shadow, but a shadow that makes small movements: a fluffing of wings, a rotation on his perch. He calls again, this time leaning forward so that his rump sticks out, and his tail feathers protrude behind him. This elicits a reply from the circular saw owl, which answers with a screech to each of his calls.
They are talking to each other, clearly. Perhaps it is courtship. The screeching of the circular saw is now replaced by a responding set of hoots, and the hooting becomes a duet, alternating piano and forte. Meanwhile, the cold air has discovered the bare skin in the gap between my gloves and jacket cuffs. My back hurts from standing for so long, and I begin to feel the need to pee. But I can’t leave, not while life is revealing itself, while it is sounding itself, in a way that is changing how I view this humble woodlot. It is the difference between a dark, empty barn, and a candle-lit cathedral when the organ pipes are sounded.
The owl decides that he is done calling. It is time for action. I try not to blink for fear of missing what will come next. He spreads his wings and jumps from the branch, suspended in midair for a fraction of a second. I am viewing him 80 to 100 feet above, on a tree perhaps 25 yards from me, and the span of his wings is enormous. He glides in silence towards the location of his duet partner, and I lose sight of him. There is another call, a pause, and then he launches off again, a giant black kite, and glides away in to the darkness. Or on to my backyard, into my memory, and maybe even my dreams; I can’t really be sure.