April 4-20, Easter Sunday
I wanted to be sure before I declared this year’s barred owl nesting season in my yard to be officially over. I’m as sure as I’m going to be now that I won’t have any chicks for Easter.
It’s impossible to know why, but it could have been the incessant hammering behind my yard for a week after the new fence was built drove them to find a different site; it could have been that a squirrel or a dreaded raccoon ate the eggs; it could have been any number of illnesses or reproductive problems in the parents. Whatever the reason, the owls stopped visiting the hollow after the day when I saw the dad staring down into the hollow for a long time.
I heard a loud hoot that reverberated and echoed at 2 a.m. when I took Charlie out in the night on April 5. Later in the morning, crows were making a racket back in the woods. The next evening the whole region was under another emergency warning for storms, flooding, and wind, and Memphis was hit with major flash flooding. After the worst was over, Charlie and I went up to the dam at the lake behind my house and watched the water rushing over the spillway. Canada geese were swimming happily, and some little dark birds were darting around the surface of the lake.
On April 8, I began recording the morning bird calls on my Merlin app. It suggested several new birds that I haven’t even heard of, and several that I know but have never seen in my yard. One that’s new to me is a Prothonotary Warbler—a big name for a little yellow bird that nests in cavities. Maybe it's in my elm tree. And a Fish Crow, smaller than a regular crow, usually found near the coast. The Merlin IDs are “suggestions” that may or may not be accurate; I believe they usually are, but how would a Fish Crow get here? Would it come up the Mississippi River?
The app used the conventional capital letters for bird species, as it recognized a Blue-gray Gnatcatcher, a Yellow-rumped Warbler, a Ruby-crowned Kinglet, a Golden-crowned Kinglet, a little blue bird called a Northern Parula, an Eastern Phoebe, a Hermit Thrush, a Yellow-throated Vireo, a Kentucky Warbler, a Red-winged Blackbird, a Cedar Waxwing, and a Great Crested Flycatcher. And finally, the favorite bird I wrote about in my 5th grade report on birds, the Northern Flicker. I may have seen one here years ago. (Like Anne Lamott’s brother, I wrote that report “bird by bird,” but I loved every minute of it.)
I know, I changed the subject. My kids say I do that when it’s convenient. After enjoying all the new suggested birds, I saw a big bird fly up into one of my sweet gum trees, too high for me to get a good look; I think it was a hawk, but it could have been an owl or a crow. A little later, the woman who regularly walks along the berm in a pink coat with her golden retriever stopped and stared up into the pine tree. What was she looking at?
And later that morning, we were upstairs when Charlie emitted a long, scary “Hoooowwwwl!!!” I looked out through my bedroom sliding glass doors and saw a giant black bird just behind the back fence. I immediately recognized it as a wild turkey. I’ve seen them out there before, but it’s been a few years. We stepped out on the deck, just to make sure it was truly a turkey and not a turkey buzzard. Sure enough, it was a turkey, and there was a second one with it. They walked up the berm, turned towards each other to create a mirror image, and stood there looking at each other! Two females. I didn’t have my phone or good camera, and I knew they wouldn’t stay there long enough for me to grab one. So I just enjoyed the sight, agog, and tried to commit it to memory.
The next morning, April 9, one of the owls came to visit. I spied it while I was standing behind my garage watching Charlie play. It looked like a shadow on one of the highest pine branches, easy to miss, not usually in my line of vision and not visible from the Bird Room or my office window. In the video above, you can find it in the pine tree, across from the squiggle that looks like a nose pointing right at it.
It touched me to see him or her there, after the normal time for the chicks to hatch. They usually leave when nesting season is over, and I know all the signs of the end of the nesting season. If there had been chicks, I would have seen the owls arriving off and on all day long for a few weeks. I kept waiting, thinking they were just late, but now the time has passed, at least in my experience so far.
But still, I wonder what its appearance there means. Is this going to be its normal hangout now? How many times has it sat in that spot without my seeing it? I was content and at peace yesterday, accepting the empty hollow, but now that I see this owl again, how do I stay content and stop watching? I’ll just remain open to whatever happens.
When I looked over into the woods, it reminded me, out of nowhere, of a college trip I took to Oxford, Mississippi in the spring of 1975, drinking in the solid green of the woods, feeling the freshness and the humidity, as we headed into Faulkner territory and the kudzu for a conference on Southern literature at Ole Miss. Eudora Welty and Cleanth Brooks were there, signing the books I’d bought. Exactly fifty years ago, I now realize.
Two minutes into my morning meditation, I heard the owl hoot.
April 10
Big black crows have been strolling around my yard and my next-door neighbor’s. They’ve been hanging out in the front yard and the street, too. Last year I had a ‘murder’ of them in my yard for several weeks after the owls’ nesting season, but I don’t know where they nested—never in my yard, that I know of. They’re not here entirely to chase the owls, I understand.
I found a number of websites that interpret the owls’ calls. I wonder why I haven’t found these sites before; maybe they’re new, or search engines work better these days. I learned from a book I bought that the single downward Whooo! is a warning call and that the females’ signature call is higher than the males’. I still didn’t find a definitive explanation of what all the hoots mean. One source said similar calls are used for a variety of situations. I don’t think anyone knows yet, and what they do say is mostly speculation. Sometimes I think, for me, the downward Whooo! is a greeting.
The moon was full that night, and when I got home around 8:30 p.m., I let Charlie out. He wandered around and was standing near the hollow tree when an owl hooted so loudly that I knew it was in my yard, near the deck, but it was too dark to see. I heard another owl replying from far away, probably in the woods closer to the lake.
They hooted back and forth, the full ‘who cooks for you’ sequence with some extra wok woks, about six times, or more. Possibly a mating call. Were they going to try again? I started to go inside but decided to stay out on the deck and try to record them. So of course they went silent. It was a thrill anyway. The moon was behind the clouds, and as it came out, Charlie started barking at something on the ground that I couldn't see. It could have been a snake, so in we came. I checked my Nestcam footage and could make out the owl flying away from the cherry tree by my deck, after its final loud hoot that night.
April 12
A gorgeous Eastern Bluebird just flew in while I was meditating and perched on the bird feeder line for several minutes, flew behind the trees to get a worm from the ground, and returned to his perch to display his colors.
In case this isn’t obvious, having barred owls nest in a hollow tree in my suburban backyard, is quite out of the ordinary. It's like having a couple of deer hop over the gate, breed and have a fawn, come and go as they please, and return the next year. Some people put out owl boxes to attract them, but I haven’t heard of anyone else who’s had barred owls nest, year after year, in a natural cavity only twenty feet from their home. If you hear of someone who has, please let me know.
The owls, every year, are a riot of sound and beauty, intrigue and appeal. They appear and disappear, hide and show off, tease me and stare at me, as if to say, "Look what I can do!" Their size alone is a sight to behold. Their straight wings when sailing are an inspiration. They are anything but ordinary birds.
The wildlife in this yard has included baby rabbits, baby raccoons, and a string of baby quail following their mother in my backyard, also known as bob-whites. I’ve had a nest of hummingbirds and several Carolina wrens’ nests, one of which was in a spot in my garage where I could watch the babies hatch. Another nestful of baby wrens pooped all over my new car inside the garage, because at the time they could perch on the bicycles hanging from the ceiling right over the car. There’s probably a cardinal’s nest up in my trees somewhere, now. I've seen baby ducks and geese and their nests up at the lake. These are all wonderful and fascinating.
The owls, however, are a different story. They’ve brought me into their family and I've brought them into mine, generations of us. There's nothing else like it in my life. I believe it’s fair to call it a symbiotic relationship.
I heard one of the owls hoot in my yard for the last time almost a week ago, on April 14. I believe they’ll be back next year. They should be comfortable in this yard now. Meanwhile, I’ve been uploading videos and sequences of the owls to YouTube, beginning with 2017. Check them out on my YouTube channel under two playlists: videos I’ve curated, called “My barred owls” and my videos from The Owl Bulletin called “Backyard Barred Owls.”
I’d hoped I could post photos of new chicks for you to enjoy, but we don’t get to choose what happens. I’ll add a new post with some of my favorite photos from last year soon, and I’ll continue to blog about the wildlife I see. Sometimes an owl will visit in the middle of the summer; last July, one perched on top of my freestanding bird feeder, looking like an ornament. In the meantime, here’s the hawk that visited this morning, Easter Sunday, just as I began to meditate. It’s probably a red-shouldered hawk but it could be a different species; it proceeded to fly back and forth, and it might have had a companion.
Enjoy your life; keep on the lookout for the wild things; and please leave a note to tell me about your own owl and birding experiences.
P.S. Now that I’ve published this post, I’m hearing the owls hooting it up outside again. I hope they hang out with me all year!
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