Perhaps due to a couple of brief moments in my life, or perhaps due to something I cannot name, I have an afinity for owls. Hence this thread:
NYT
I’m driving in the last of the dusk, bare trees on both sides of the road. A bird form slants silently across the highway, just above the arc of the headlights. Impossible to say what color it is, but it is an owl. It is all I ever see of owls up around my farm, that swift, peripheral, ghosting drift across an opening in the trees. Every time I see one I remember the great gray owl that I saw years ago above a hilly dirt road just before dawn in southern Montana. It was as though a cumulonimbus cloud had been compressed into bird shape and given stern yellow eyes.
I see a lot of wildlife in the course of my day. There are the crows that wait in the maple tree until the barn cat has finished eating on the deck. They look far less sagacious when they have a bit of cat food in their beaks. Every time I go out to the chicken yard, I scare up a red-tailed hawk. It sits on a hickory branch above the hens, which are safe beneath a net. Its fierce serenity looks more like petulance as it flies off, having put in another day watching what it cannot have. In the dark, I walk out into the pasture with Ceilidh, the Border terrier, and we can sense the deer, which have gone gray with winter.
But I would like to see more owls. Maybe they are out there keeping an eye out — the great horned and screech, saw-whet and short-eared and the barn owl. One summer dusk I’d like to go out and have the owls make themselves as visible as the bats that drop out of my eaves.
And I would like a holiday when all the hidden creatures around the farm would make themselves apparent just for an hour or two. They step out from their camouflage, from their hidden bowers, from their holes and burrows and nests and recesses. The owls would surely be among them. VERLYN KLINKENBORG
