Welcoming committee

We're in the process of completing our second relocation of the year, having most recently moved from temporary digs in Portsmouth NH to our new permanent address just over the Maine border. On one of our last mornings in New Hampshire I went for a morning hike and saw this bobcat crossing the trail just ahead of me. I quickened my pace a bit, figuring the cat would likely disappear into the brush before I could set up a shot, but it seemed to be in no great hurry and even turned around to look back at me for a moment. I've seen bobcats a few times before, but this is the first time I've had one pose. After a few seconds it moved off.

The mid-fall Maine weather has been far warmer than advertised, with temps grazing 80, and for several days the side of our house swarmed with ladybird beetles and assasssin bugs. The latter weren't living up to their name, perhaps because they know that the beetles are somewhat toxic; the two species crawled around each other, pursuing their separate interests.

Then last night, around 8:30, an owl started hooting outside and kept it up for roughly a half-hour. The noise kept setting off our dog, and finally I took him out for a look. The bird, probably a great horned owl, was clearly visible in the top of a tree just across the street and was undisturbed by our presence. It flew off eventually but made a brief return just after dawn.

Season's Greetings

Because nothing says "Christmas" like owls on velocipedes.

Owl report

A few years ago I had a good run of luck with owl sightings, but last year there were none at all and I hadn't seen any this year until now. Two days ago when I was walking the dog I heard the telltale whistle-hiss of a barred owl in an area where I'd seem them many times in the past. I couldn't get a definite visual on it and didn't have my camera with me, but I made note of the place so I could return. Yesterday it rained but this morning I headed for the same spot, with camera this time but sans dog.

On my way out I thought I heard the same hissing sound but it was too faint for me to be sure; on the way back, though, there was no mistaking it. I walked off the trail a few yards in that direction until I located the owl high up in a very tall tulip poplar. I wasn't close enough to see it well, but since I didn't want to spook it I let my camera zoom in and do the looking. After a few minutes I moved to a slightly different angle, then started to walk away. A single distinct "hoot" from nearby stopped me in my tracks. I looked up: a large adult owl was perched, by itself, in another large tree about fifty yards from the first, keeping a wary eye on me. I took some pictures and headed home.

I thought there might have been a second owl in the first tree, but couldn't tell for sure. It was only when I downloaded the images that I realized that there were no less than four, probably all juveniles. (One is largely concealed behind a limb in the shot below.) Had I known they were there, I would have made a better job of getting them all in the frame.

The Norway maple and tulip poplar leaves are coming out this week; the other trees are a bit behind. I'll give the owls a week's worth of privacy before I check in on them again, but by then I suspect they'll be harder to spot. Still, it's good to know that this family is thriving.

At the equinox

This ill-starred year grinds towards its end but still has ample time to accumulate additional misfortunes. My body remains on summer schedule, attuned to neither the clock nor the sun. I lie in the dark and wait for signs of daylight, then rise and perform the little rituals of waking up the house. I draw curtains open, put water on to boil, make breakfast. Outside I've already pulled up the tomatoes and summer squash, and the okra is bearing more slowly as the daylight dwindles and temperatures begin to drop. I wrap up the butternut squash fruits in pillow-cases at night to keep the deer from eating them before they're ready to cut off the vine. The resident hummingbirds still buzz around their feeder, but the swallowtail butterflies that feasted on our zinnias all summer have moved on.

Gardening plans, early morning walks, things not accomplished, will have to be deferred. There's a sense, in general, of being balanced on the cusp — but of what? Winter's grim days and long nights can't be avoided, and spring now seems very far away.

One late afternoon I came across a barred owl at the edge of a wood. I wasn't looking for it, nor it for me. It settled on a branch and looked me over, but not so intently that it couldn't be distracted by a hawk calling in the distance. Somehow it will probably make its way through the winter. I'll keep an eye out for it next year.

The Limit

Years ago, a friend from grad school and I decided to spend most of one summer rambling around rural New England on foot. Sergei had been born in what was then still the Soviet Union and was studying engineering (he later pioneered a mechanism that greatly increased the efficiency of wind turbines). I was studying environmental science but had no clear career path in mind, nor would I for some time thereafter. We both figured that it wasn't going to be long before we got sucked up into some kind of corporate or academic drudgery that would keep us occupied for years, and that this might be our last chance for anything resembling freedom. Sergei wasn't even all that interested in the outdoors, but he had an adaptable character and was equally happy spending his days walking a rural road in the Northeast Kingdom as he was watching television in his dorm room or tinkering in the engineering lab.

We were both agreed that we wanted to avoid the well-traveled trails, even if that meant going out of our way or missing some of the scenic high points. We also took care not to venture too far from civilization, since our provisions were limited to whatever we could carry on our backs. We could go a day or two on trail mix and the like if we had to, but when ever possible we would load up on bread and cheese at some local store in the towns we passed along the way. Foraging wasn't something we had any inclination or background to engage in, although we did eat our share of berries we found along the roadside.

In order to minimize the weight we had to carry we didn't bring a tent, just our sleeping bags and some sheets of plastic that we thought might keep us dry but never did. Luckily it was a dry summer and most of the time we managed to find shelter of some kind when it rained. Here and there we were offered a bed for the night by people we met along the way, but we usually declined. Somehow we managed to wander from western Connecticut up through the Berkshires, across the Green Mountains and through New Hampshire into central Maine, before circling back through eastern Massachusetts and heading home, without getting eaten by bears, bitten by rattlesnakes, or murdered by psychopaths, and we were even still speaking to each other when it was all over.

I'm a lifelong insomniac, and although my symptoms abated a bit under the daily routine of trekking ten miles or more a day, I was never like Sergei, who could plod along from sunup to sundown without ever appearing tired but then for want of a better bed could sink into an apparent coma leaning against a tree when he finally came to a stop. Sometimes I fell asleep easily enough, but after an hour or so I would wake into a miserable combination of exhaustion, anxiety, and exhilaration in which I often lingered until the first grey beginnings of dawn. I would wake in the morning sore and depressed, though I bounced back soon enough once I stretched my legs and had a bite to eat.

One evening, not long after we crossed the upper Connecticut River into New Hampshire, we left the road and went off into the forest a half-mile or so to find a sheltered place for the night, not wanting to be too obvious about it since we were presumably trespassing. We found a little clearing where the undergrowth had been nibbled down by deer and spread our sleeping bags out under the stars, which on that moonless night were as brilliant and abundant as I had ever seen them. It was comfortably warm and the only sound, once we settled down, was the chattering of flying squirrels somewhere high above us. Sergei of course was out like a light at once, and I too fell asleep before long, but I woke a while later — how much later I couldn't tell, as my watch dial wasn't luminous — and at first I couldn't remember where I was. I could hear Sergei breathing lightly a few yards away and eventually I came to my senses, but with a feeling of despair that it was probably hours until dawn and that I was too agitated to return to sleep. I got up and walked around a bit, but didn't stray too far lest I stumble over something in the dark. Had I been a smoker now would have been the time to light up, but I didn't have even that recourse.

I took a sweater out of my knapsack and pulled it on against the beginnings of a chill. I sat on a fallen tree trunk and looked up at the stars and thought about everything and nothing: about the vastness of the universe and my own insignificance in it, about my family and some young women I knew from school, about the future, about a hundred things that seemed to matter at that late hour but probably wouldn't in the light of day. I don't know how much time passed by. I felt a bit drowsy but didn't have the energy to get into my sleeping bag again and wage the struggle for sleep.

From somewhere in the dark, high above, I heard a single brief sound, just distinct enough for me to recognize the hoot of a barred owl, the sturdy night-bird of the many childhood evenings I had spent out of doors. They were common enough where I grew up and often active in the day; I had seen them dozens of times. I listened until I heard the telltale call in full: Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you? Softly, not so loud as to risk waking Sergei, I echoed the call: Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you? There was dead silence for a long time, then I thought I heard a fluttering not far off. I repeated the call and the owl responded, closer this time, maybe just ten yards away. I held my breath, then gave the call once more.

Immediately, without warning, the owl swooped down and began striking its wings fiercely against my face. I fell backwards off the trunk and as it followed me down I felt its feathertips and the pressure waves of each wingbeat. I covered my eyes with my arm, expecting at any second to feel talons tearing my face. I opened my mouth to yell to Sergei for help but my voice was paralyzed and nothing emerged. Eventually the owl's rage subsided and it flew off as invisibly as it had arrived. I felt my face and my hands for blood but there was nothing. I crawled into my sleeping bag, pulled it up around my head, and lay panting, finally weeping.

At dawn I crawled out of the sleeping bag and looked around; there wasn't a feather in sight or any other indication of the incident, and except for a bruise on my elbow where I had fallen back I could have dismissed it all as a dream — but I knew it was not. When Sergei began to stir I told him what had happened. He didn't understand at first — I had to repeat the whole story — but I think in the end he believed me.

When I try to think back on the incident in a reasoned manner the encounter still baffles me, but I think I understand now that I had somehow violated a sacred boundary. It wasn't my physical presence in the clearing that had crossed a line, or even my pretending to be an owl and calling out in the dark in a language I didn't understand. It was something else; I had transgressed, if only for a second, a margin where the domain of the human reached its terminus. The owl and I could exist in the same space, but in every other way our worlds were mutually impenetrable. I could no more understand the owl's behavior that night than it could understand the road maps we carried or the pop songs that were stuck in our heads.

Sergei and I made it safely home and finished up our studies the next spring. We still drop each other a line every now and then.

NB: The above is fiction, except for the insomnia.

Owl

Winter can be a frustrating time for the saunterer, but now and then you get a lucky break. On a mild Sunday afternoon in January I put the dog in the car and drove a few miles to a park where there are four thousand or so acres of woodlands and fields. The park road up the hill I wanted to visit was closed, so I left the car at the bottom and took a trail that hooked around to the top. The trail was deserted and the woods silent except for the occasional sound of a jet passing overhead. At the summit, stone camping shelters stood empty and alone among unmown fields and scattered oaks, their fires cold, but solitary electric lights burned, even in daylight, to mark the entrances to the rest rooms. On our way back down I heard an owl hoot several times in quick succession not far off in a stand of pines, but I never spotted it. As we drove out a hawk crossed in front of us and alit in a tree. I pulled over but I knew it would fly off if I opened the car door and so made no attempt to get a better look.

On the way home I decided to turn onto a back road I don't usually take. I saw a jogger up ahead of me on the left, and as I slowed I noticed something in the neglected field on my right: a barred owl, perched on a dead tree. I pulled over, turned on the four-way flashers, reached for my camera, and rolled down the window.

I see owls with some regularity, sometimes by accident and sometimes by intention, but most often by having the intention of seeing them by accident. Contrary to the assumptions many people have, they're not necessarily exclusively nocturnal, and barred owls, which are frequently active by day, aren't particularly skittish. Still, I've never had one pose so cooperatively, at eye level just a few yards off and in decent light.

Fortunately, the dog, who barks or howls at anything from squirrels to Canada geese, either didn't see it or didn't register it as potential prey. He no doubt wondered why we had stopped. I took pictures for several minutes, while the owl kept an eye on the field and now and then swiveled its head to regard me with apparent neutrality. I kept expecting it to fly off but it never did. Eventually it was I who drove away instead.

Other prisoners

Miscellaneous photos, all taken this spring within a mile of downtown, of some of our distant cousins in the Being business.

From top: unidentified snake, green frog, box turtle, melanistic gray squirrel, rose-breasted grosbeak, feral cat. Below: raven, barred owl.

Update: In posting and titling the above, I had temporarily forgotten this passage from Henry Beston (even though I had used it last year):

We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.