Owl Power

Crows were making a racket in a corner of the Royal Annapolis Royal Gardens (did I get the name right?). But what really got my attention was that it wasn’t just crows, but robins, grackles, and others, too.

While my companions looked at the flowers (the garden has an astounding array of heritage roses, cultivars of heather, others - anyway, just plants), I hunted down what the fuss was about. I came up empty, and was about to give up, when I thought I might have seen the tell-tale tiger pattern that could be a Great-horned Owl’s underside, or could be just tree bark.

I was glad I persisted in finding the right place to view the tree from. It was surprisingly far from the tree (had to take out a few heirloom roses along the way, but it was worth it). And, also surprising, the crows had given up by then, by which point I used to give up searching, thinking that if an owl was there, they’d persist. But I’ve recently found that rule doesn’t hold at all; crows really are smart enough to back off if the owl hasn’t moved and there’s a creepy human around.

I run into Barred Owls a lot, but it had been a long time since I’d seen a great-horned. What is it with owls? No matter how often you run into them, they deliver that reliable buzz of mingled excitement and awe. Perhaps it’s a chemical release from a brain centre we inherited from our tree shrew ancestors: despite ourselves, they scare the shit out of us, and we’d like to know exactly where they are.