We’re right in the city, but there is a Douglas fir not far from our house in which a barred owl was spotted. Ha ha! That’s a little birder humor, there. Spotted owls and barred owls are different. They look similar but the spotted is more petite, and endangered by the encroachment of the barred owls. Field biologists are so worried about the demise of the spotted owl that they are even trying to see what happens if they can manage to shoot a bunch of barred owls, through their tears.
A barred owl is not your little button of a bird. It doesn’t perch so much as it hunkers. It occupies. It’s substantial. So you’d think it would be easy for us to spot, but then you’d be underestimating our depths of oblivitude. It’s not that we don’t notice things. Personally, I’m capable of noticing everything about a little bug without noticing that it is crawling up Sasquatch’s foot. If I’m bent over a bush picking huckleberries and blunder into a bear doing the same thing, I’d probably wonder who upholstered the berry bush.
We’ve got a massive cedar tree that is home to at least one family of raccoons and a number of opossums. We know this because occasionally we see them melting out of it in the evening on their way to taking flamenco lessons on our roof. But even though the tree is not particularly dense, and raccoons can get to be the size of washing machines, we’ve never spotted one in the daytime. And we’ve looked.
When clues to reality do filter in, we can’t always make sense of them at first. When I started working as a letter carrier, I drove a Jeep from the right-hand side. After a few weeks of this, I went to drive my own car and climbed in the passenger side. I just sat there for a few moments, confused. First I noticed I didn’t have a place to stick in my keys. Then I noticed I didn’t have a steering wheel, either. Then I concluded I’d had a stroke. I was twenty-three. It hasn’t gotten any better with time.
Can’t say Dave is always on the mark either. One morning after we first moved in the house, he was
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| Observational skills. |
gazing out the kitchen window and noticed that it seemed a lot lighter outside than usual. And then he noticed a house across the alley he didn’t remember seeing before. He let these observations drift through his mind for a few beats before thinking to wonder why some bastard had installed half of a blackened tree in our yard. Which eventually resolved into the charred remains of a large flowering cherry we did have. Our entire detached garage had burned all the way to the ground. Burned so thoroughly that he didn’t even remember we had one.
The point is, it was highly unlikely the two of us were going to spot a barred owl in our neighborhood. And we didn’t. The fellow whose tree it was in pointed it out. But now that we know where it is, we can spot it just fine. It’s hunkered plumb above the poop pile on the sidewalk. If it rains, we’ll have to ask the guy for an update.
Camouflage is wonderful. Especially with owls. The only owl I spotted was the one that had been hit by a car and was sitting stunned on the side of the narrow mountain road. He was winking at me, damaged eye :-(, and I would not have noticed had he not been winking at me.
Aw, crumb. Dave and I once spent untold hours at the camouflage exhibit in the Smithsonian, trying to find the stick bugs and such. Then we spent the rest of the time in Julia Child's kitchen.
I once was walking in the center of our tiny town with my son and a hawk flew at a tree for a squirrel. He flew right in front of two other pedestrians, barely missed them, and they did not flinch, did not notice the drama (squirrel did, he escaped.)
I was down at the shore, 150 yards out dolphins were doing that circle thing, rounding up bait fish and then busting up through the middle of the bait ball (very big blue marbleesque). A pair of walkers with their i-pods did not even notice. I tried to point it out to them and they treated me like I had the plague. It is amazing how much we miss with eyes wide open.
HE MISSED THE BURNED DOWN GARAGE? funny.
He did. What happened was we were at the coast for the weekend and we came home in the middle of the night, so we missed the whole conflagration. He got up first and was just doing that first-light window gazing. I am telling you, there was nothing left of that garage. It took a while to discover the lawn was entirely black, too.
Yes, joeh's last line – HOW DID DAVE MISS THE BURNING?
As for seeing wildlife, or more to the point, NOT seeing it, that's just nature's camouflage at work. At least, that's my story, as I peer astigmatically around me.
I am totally capable of noticing little tiny things and missing the big picture. Plus, I talk too much. That sometimes tamps down the nature show. Or so I'm told, when someone gets a word in edgewise.
Hah! I may be guilty of that also.
And I forgot to say: those drawings are hilarious!
Thanks! Lots more where they came from, in Trousering Your Weasel.
I plead guilty to a mis-directed focus myself. And once spent rather a lot of time wondering why the swipe card which let me into work wasn't nearly so obliging at my front door.
Jealous about your owl and your raccoons though. And would need to faecal signpost to see the owl.
Oh boy, do I relate to your swipe card dilemma. But then again I still (STILL) sometimes pick up my smart phone and listen for the dial tone. For, like, seconds.
Smart phones don't have a dial tone? That's not very smart.
Yeah. How am I supposed to know if it's ready to dial or not?
The drawings are wonderful, and the narrative is hilarious. Observitude really is not your strong suit, is it?
Everyone in my family was observitaceous, but not all that usefully. I once sketched a family portrait in which my sister and brother were staring straight up into the sky with binoculars, my other sister was picking up arrowheads, my father was bent over a mushroom, and I was rolling a log for salamanders. My mom was staring straight ahead at the bear in the trail.
Beware of the killer attack owls. Don't even think about jogging. Wouldn't work as a problem for me because i never think about jogging.
the Ol'Buzzard
I hear there is an attack barred owl in Salem, Oregon now that likes to steal hats. It's a thing. I don't think it's a real rare thing, either, but news is slow. I like your jogging antidote. I never think about it either, because my pants are never on fire.
I can just see them ==shooting a barred owl, then upon seeing its corpse, discovering it is a spotted owl! I am not sure what is the solution but it seems that shooting one owl to save another will probably cause more problems and turn out not to be a good solution at all.
I'll bet they don't shoot any spotted owls by accident. It's real controversial, and no one involved in the program (which seeks to eliminate barred owls from certain territories, to see how it affects the spotted owls in that territory) feels all that good about it. And if you can't tell a barred from a spotted, and it's in your scope, and you care, you don't shoot. These ain't yahoos. That said, I kind of agree with you, not that I'm any expert. I suspect what's going to happen is going to happen.
This seems right on par with me asking the health food store assistant if they had any apricot kernel oil because I couldn't find any, he took me to the very same shelf that I'd been looking at, reading the labels left to right, right to left and there it was. Well, colour me blind!
Dave has a theory about that, and it applies to the drawer that is supposed to have a spatula in it. He says "you have to know it's there." If you know it's there, you'll find it. Otherwise…
Makes sense. I know exactly what is in my drawers, kitchen or any other room, so I can find anything in them always.
I know what's in my drawers, too.
Decades ago I used to take an (human) imprinted Barred Owl to scouts and school groups so they could see one close up. It tended not to poop in public having been raised by humans. I think that's really what the kids came to see, though.
I've always been jealous of people with wrist adornments. I know it's not the best for the bird, but jeez. Dave and I saw a little tiny owl we keep calling a "pocket owl" on someone's wrist once and we can't stop talking about it. I think Tater would like it, too.