Owlspeak

February 22

I think the female owl is still calling for her mate. She's not staying in the nest very long and keeps flying back to the berm. I hear the duets; there must be a male. Does she still have her partner? Why hasn’t he shown up?

I’ve read this year that the average lifespan of a barred owl in the wild is eight years. I knew that some have lived twenty years or longer in captivity, but if these owls are the same ones I’ve hosted since 2017, they’re getting old.

I don't want to go down the path of all the possible ways an owl might die, but I worry about them. Last year at this time I was worrying about them, too. I’m excited when I see them and frustrated when I don’t. I know I’m missing some of their appearances, even though these days I’m at home most of the time.

And I'm becoming convinced that they're not the same pair, with their different behaviors and patterns. I keep saying I’ll compare my photos over the years, but it seems unlikely that I could tell for sure. So I just have to enjoy worrying until I get tired of it and remember that I’ll never know. The mystery is part of the appeal.

In the first years I was cautious about telling too many people about them, especially the teenage boys at my school, for fear that they would try to come see them and possibly harm them. My protective instincts ruled, knowing the tendencies of boys and men who have guns and love to shoot. My boys and men would never do that. It seems unlikely now, but it would only take one mean person.

February 24

At 1:30 p.m., I was in the process of creating my first Substack newsletter, when Mama Owl began hooting, as if congratulating me. Was that a coincidence or the subtle cooperation of the universe?

I slipped over to my office window and started taking a video, after I went back and grabbed my phone from my desk. She was right there in the hollow, and I got the best video of her hooting that I've ever taken. Her mate hooted back in the distance and she looked his way, then turned to look at me, watching her from my office window.

While she was sitting there, a bluejay came to get a close look and hopped around in the adjacent cherry tree. Bluejays are cousins of the crows, prettier but just as mean. She tolerated his insults as she kept an eye on him. It was smart of him not to attack this big mama, though. She finally turned around and entered the cavity, and four minutes later she came back up, looked around a few minutes, and flew away over the berm.

Owl meditation, February 24

When I looked outside at 8:10 a.m., the owl had come out of the hollow and was sitting silently in the entrance. I sat in my chair and spent 14 minutes meditating. She didn't move.

I went up to get the camera and took a picture of her. I think she's sleeping, but it felt very much like I had a little Buddha meditating with me.

The owl is fluffed out, chest forward, eyelids barely open. She just opened her mouth and it looked like, for all the world, that she yawned. I don't want to stop watching her, but it's time to make some breakfast.

One of the mantras I liked best on my yoga retreat was designed to release anxiety and frustration. The syllables are: “Sa Ta Na Ma Wha-Hey Guru.” I hadn’t tried to find out what the words meant until yesterday because I didn’t want to not like them, and when I found them, I was amazed at another synchronicity. The translation: "Birth, Life, Death, Rebirth. O Wonderful Lord."

I laughed when I realized this, and today while I meditated with the mantra, it made me smile. Perfect. This is my story, and the primal story, just now illustrated in my backyard so clearly by my owls. I have so much, too much, left to learn. I hope that sharing what I do know will be helpful.

February 25

It's almost over, the gray month, and winter. I set an intention to take a trip every year in February to cheer me up, and then come home to enjoy the last cold days.

I'm content now with watching and writing about the owls. I don't think I saw or heard one yesterday. Why don’t I check the Nestcam footage every day that I don't see any activity? I’m not patient enough unless I’ve seen them and know where to look. I can skip 15 seconds at a time, but it's tedious and I find my attention drifting.

It’s now 7:10 a.m., and an owl just arrived and turned to look at me. This one looks small. It's staring down into the hollow and I couldn't see whether it had anything in its beak. Its tail just went up, and it went inside. It was only visible for a minute or less. But my body just sent out an infusion of feel-good hormones, and I'm breathing better, as if my husband just got home and gave me a hug and a kiss. I'm glad I'm sitting in the wing back chair with the better view. Is it possible that the male just went in, or did one of last year's chicks drop by to visit?

Last Friday, when Lex arrived to remove the rat trap, a pretty yellow-brown bird was lying on my front porch, dead. He picked it up and said he’d dispose of it, and in my mind, I blamed a stray cat for killing and leaving it there, the most likely explanation. Then yesterday I opened the door to pick up a package and there was another little dead bird, the same kind, just past the porch, on the entry walk. That was sad and becoming a little creepy, but maybe Lex didn’t dispose of the first bird after all and there’s only one. I'll have to remember to take care of the body today and find out if it's a finch or a wren. I have a camera in front so maybe I can see what happened. Stray cats do roam the area, and I know they've been guilty before. But why leave them on my doorstep? I never pet or feed the cats. And it's unlike­ly that the birds would fly into the glass storm door or the small window and kill themselves, but it's possible. If a hawk chased them there, it seems that it would collect the remains.

I've said that I’m not a superstitious person and I don’t usually see signs in everyday occurrences. That's why it's hard to interpret the world and find genuine spiritual connections that fit my logical mindset. The kind that don't have facile explanations. I've tripped over cracks and never broken my mother's back. Seven years of bad luck all because of a broken mirror? Or the red cardinals that have been here for decades—are they now suddenly a sign from Cary, the STL Cardinals fan? They're a tag in my brain at the very least, a reminder of him, and in that way they bring him back. But I have to admit that since I’ve lost him and Dylan, it feels easier to hear a message or sense connections, especially when I’m meditating.

My writing partner, Christine, sent me an excerpt from a book about Zuni myths. They see owls as a strong symbol of transformation from light to dark, between the physical and the spiritual.* She also sent me the photo of her little spooky art deco-like figurine—a Zuni owl fetish—and said maybe it brought her to me. It could be; we have such beautiful webs of connection that feel more spiritual than superstitious to me, like the details that lined up to take me to Kauai. I believe we're all interconnected and that we want to under­stand these strong connections so much that we sometimes make up stories about them. But another approach is to allow the true story to reveal that thin, powerful, glistening web just when the light catches it. The truth of our interconnected­ness, not the quick, overly easy explanations, can become clear in our intuition and our psyches.

We humans, like birds, love the order of patterns. We construct our lives around them: calendars, maps, star charts, the sun, the moon, the genetic code. We're learning that some of them are built into us and many more are waiting to be found through our intuition. It's a universe of marvels.

I got up this morning and looked out at the hollow. Owl wings were sticking out of the top of the hollow. And the male owl was in the pine tree again! Then the female peeked out and came all the way to the mouth of the hollow. She looked small, almost like a chick. In a minute or less, she flew away and the male stayed in the pine. I'm mystified. They're not behaving at all like the original owls. People ask if some of their offspring might come back and end up using the hollow. It’s a valid question, but my sources say the kids have to leave the immediate area when they’re mature and find a separate place to live.

Yesterday around five I sat on the deck while Charlie wandered and played. I decided to practice my yoga teacher’s meditation for “prosperity” (spiritual or material) for a few minutes. About halfway through, I opened my eyes for no good reason, and an owl flew up to the Thompson's tree next to our shared fence and sat there for ten minutes, then flew away. Did my meditation (or did I) conjure him? Logic says no; it was normal owl activity time, the best time to watch for them, but it felt like synchronicity.

The little frogs called spring peepers started singing two nights ago. Such a comforting and pretty sound on a still night, but then I remembered listening to them with Cary and felt the sadness I'll always feel, to some extent, at this time of year.

Sometimes I'll hear a bullfrog, One summer there was one in my yard near the kettle fountain. The sky was striped with pale pinks and blues this morning, but now it's blue, gray, and white.

February 28

Mr. Owl is hiding so well in the pine fronds that it's hard to make him out, even with my experience over the past eight years. I saw on the Nestcam that they were both here, hooting back and forth, before I left to see Mother. I hadn’t heard them.

I can’t tell the males and females apart unless I see them at the same time: the females are up to 1/3 larger, but the coloring and shapes are the same. After seven years of watching, it appears that the male never enters the hollow, but now I can’t even be sure about that.

I looked up the little bird or birds that were dead on my doorstep. I believe they were house wrens. When I opened the front door last evening to pick up a package, about five birds that looked similar flew by, from right to left. Now I think the dead birds were chased into the glass by a hawk, but the hawk didn’t want to collect them this close to the house, with people coming and going.

I remembered a deep sea fishing trip Cary and I once took with the kids, and how hard it is to sit still and watch for hours with no results. After the long day, I was the one who snagged a sparkling, spinning, blue and green mahi mahi, and that made it all worth it. We ate it for dinner. I hope it forgave me. I’ve never been a birder for the same reason—you have to get up early and sit for long hours if necessary, and my brain and life always used to be too busy for that. But maybe I’m ready for it now. That one glimpse is all that’s needed sometimes.

*Hal Bennett, Zuni Fetishes, 1993.