The Birds and the Beasts Were There

6 Companion to Owls

Masculinity in our society is usually associated with larger size, greater strength, more aggressive instincts and a deeper voice. Conditioned to these notions, Ken and I made all the wrong assumptions the evening we saw our first horned owls.

It had been a hot day and we were watching the beginning of the California twilight. (If you don’t watch the beginning, you see very little of it — our twilights are brief, the least possible compromise between day and night.) I must have heard owls before, both here and in other parts of this country and Canada where we’ve lived, but those remembered sounds lacked reality, position in time and space, because I heard them before I was interested in birds and aware of what I was listening to. For the record, then, that warm clear evening in Santa Barbara was the occasion of my first owl.

Fortunately for me it was the great horned species, which makes a distinctly owl-like hoot, recognizable even to someone who has only read about it. Some of the other owls hoot infrequently, if at all, and make a variety of non-owlish noises: the saw-whetting sound that gives the little saw-whet owl his name, the sneeze of the barn owl, the sharp yipping of the desert elf owl, and the daytime stuttering of the burrowing owl which differs greatly from its own nighttime cooing. Tiny, the burrowing owl who’s been a pet at our local Museum of Natural History for several years, has a sound I’ve never heard this species make in the wild. When I stroke the side of his neck and ask him for a kiss, he nudges my hand gently with his beak, if he happens to be in an affectionate mood. If he’s not, he turns away with a peremptory “Zhut!” as Bronx a cheer as I’ve ever heard in California.

Ken and I went outside to see if we could locate the source of the sounds we’d heard. It wasn’t difficult. There was plenty of light, since the sun had barely started to go down, and the two owls were calling and answering each other, one from our television antenna, the other from the top of a Monterey pine tree two hundred feet away. The birds were identical except in size and voice, the one on our antenna being smaller and having a voice considerably higher in pitch. This, we learned later, was the male. His inferiority to the female in size is shared with a number of species, mainly predators like hawks and eagles and other owls, but also unrelated birds like phalaropes and kingfishers.

As we watched, the female swooped down from the top of the pine tree and passed over us so low that though I heard nothing I felt the air being displaced by her great wings. The male followed, also in utter silence, also barely clearing our heads. Were the birds trying to frighten us away? Or were they aware, as wild creatures are so often aware in advance, that something unnatural was about to happen? Perhaps it had already happened and they had heard it. Owls have so acute and accurate a sense of hearing that they can pinpoint a mouse in utter darkness.

Our faulty and underdeveloped human senses told us nothing. Even when we saw the sky changing we thought at first it was caused by jet trails. But the trails kept enlarging and spreading, forming weird moving patterns splashed with color intensified by the light from the setting sun.

Most enthusiastic bird watchers are able to remember in detail their initial meeting with any given species. Ken and I are unlikely to forget our first great horned owls since we happened to see them at the very moment that an intercontinental ballistics missile, just launched from a nearby base, was discovered to be defective and ordered to blow itself up over the Pacific Ocean.

Ken suggests another explanation why the owls, on that one occasion only, flew so audaciously low over our heads. We happened to have Johnny, our little black Scottie, with us at the time. Since the great horned owls eat many mammals like rabbits and skunks, it’s quite possible that their behavior was due not to any ICBM being blown up, but to curiosity whether Johnny was a black bunny or a stripeless skunk.

The female superiority in size among certain birds leads to a number of questions, some of them along the line of which-came-first-the-chicken-or-the-egg? In the case of at least one species, the sparrow hawk, there is evidence that the female, who is responsible for preparing and distributing to the young the food brought to the nest by the male, feeds the female nestlings oftener than she feeds the males so that the latter are some twenty percent smaller and considerably more docile than their sisters. This system of preferential treatment can be called a matriarchy.

For a more extreme and better known example of it, however, we must go to the phalarope family. Among phalaropes the roles of male and female are reversed. The females are bigger and more aggressive — if such a term can be used to describe these gentle little birds, of which all three species visit our shores. She assumes the gaudy breeding plumage and does the courting. Mundane affairs like nest building, incubating, feeding and caring for the young she leaves to the male, while she, freed from chicks and chains, rejoins the giddy friends of her girlhood. As a matter of curiosity I sometimes ask my fellow bird-watchers the name of their favorite bird and the reason for their choice. I no longer have to ask the mothers of young children. Their choice, and the reason for it, is unanimous — the phalarope.

To the amateur student of psychology this business of asking people to name their favorite bird can be highly interesting. I have a long list of birds chosen, and the reasons for each choice. A kind of rough pattern emerges from it. Surprisingly, not too many of the birds listed were picked for their beauty and those that were — among them, the western tanager, mountain bluebird, hooded oriole, vermilion flycatcher, lazuli bunting, rufous-sided towhee — were nearly always selected by rather plain-looking people. This pattern of opposites keeps repeating. Among oldsters there is a strong tendency to choose birds connected with their early youth. People who live alone are most likely to choose companionable birds, song sparrows and whitecrowns, robins, mockingbirds, meadowlarks. Timid people tend to favor the aggressors like hawks and falcons, and sad people to favor the clowns like the roadrunner, the chat, and the acorn woodpecker.

Ask the man in the street how an owl looks and sounds and he will be able to tell you, although the chances are he’s never seen or heard one. The field checklist for our area mentions eight species of owl, yet the average birder is fortunate to find half this number in a year and our annual Christmas bird count for the last six years lists only some sixty owls.

Owls are not, like the doves and pigeons which very early found their way into recorded history, a very obvious or regular part of everyone’s life. Yet they have captured the imagination and inspired the painter, the poet, the sculptor. They are found on Egyptian wall paintings, Chinese screens and Indian vases. An owl stands guard beside Michelangelo’s statue of Night at the tomb of the Medici. Owls are mentioned in the works of Homer, the Bible and the Shakespearean plays, and there are to my knowledge five Greek and four Latin words for owl.

During the fifth century b.c., and later, the staple currency of the Aegean consisted of coins known as “owls.” Manufactured in Athens, mainly of silver, each coin showed the head of Athena on the obverse side and the figure of an owl on the reverse. An argument might be made that both were intended to represent aggression and conquest since Athena was originally goddess of war and owls had the same habits then as now. But Athena later became the goddess of wisdom and it is generally accepted that this is what the coins symbolized. The choice of an owl to represent wisdom astounds people familiar with these birds. Adu and Peter Batten, who have lived as intimately with wild creatures as it is possible for human beings to do, give the owls second prize for stupidity, first prize going to the little puffbirds of the Amazon jungle. A number of observers, however, point out that great horned owls show great caution in the presence of gunfire. Our pair of horned owls gave us an example of this caution without a shot being fired.

One evening I was sitting in my lookout chair in the living room. It was 1965, the end of April and the end of a day and I was waiting for two species of birds; the great horned owl and the Vaux’ swift, and hoping they wouldn’t arrive simultaneously. The night before, they had missed each other by less than five minutes. Except for this habit of hunting at dusk, the two species had little in common, least of all size. The great horned owl is some two feet in length, the Vaux’ swift is four inches. Seen for the first time against a darkening sky the latter can quite easily be mistaken for a large and capricious insect.

The initial appearance of the Vaux’ swift at our place came at the beginning of May, 1964. It wasn’t entirely unexpected. The birds are known to migrate through our area in the spring, though they aren’t often seen when weather conditions are favorable to them. That spring, however, brought a series of heavy overcasts and the Vaux’ swifts were caught in one and grounded. A flock of fifty or so stayed, appropriately enough, at the Bird Refuge for several days. Another, much larger flock was trapped on a fairly well-traveled road north of town. Unable to orient themselves, and blinded by traffic and streetlights, they flew wildly into the windshields of passing cars and died by the hundreds. An impressionable friend of mine unfortunately happened to be driving along this road after seeing Alfred Hitchcock’s film The Birds, and the combined effect was almost disastrous. She is still careful to omit Mr. Hitchcock from her prayers.

Time passed, the fogs lifted and the swifts passed on their way northward to their breeding grounds. All except one — our bird was still appearing every evening with astonishing punctuality. In the middle of May he was joined by another swift, presumably female. Where she came from is anybody’s guess — was she a late migrant? Was the meeting accidental? Or did he go looking for a mate and persuade her to accompany him to our canyon? At any rate we were delighted because there was no official record of the Vaux’ swift nesting in southern California and we had considerable hope of supplying one. It seemed easy enough. All we had to do was watch and see which hole in which dead tree the birds emerged from and returned to. Since these birds also nest in chimneys we would have to be chimney watchers, too.

Every day, when the sun had set, I began my vigil, sometimes inside the house, sometimes outside, at the back, at the front, on the driveway. It hardly mattered, since the appearances and disappearances of these birds were like those of a magician’s rabbits. Suddenly they were there and just as suddenly they weren’t. Their speed, their unpredictable twists and turns and the number of hiding places available made constant observation impossible. I was lucky to get my binoculars on them for a fraction of a second.

On July 19, a third swift appeared with the other two, and while I didn’t witness any feeding maneuvers, I was as certain as I could be under the circumstances that the pair had mated and this was their fledgling. During the following week a new ornithological rule emerged from my experience: it is just as easy to lose track of three Vaux’ swifts as it is to lose track of two. Right under my nose (presumably) the birds had mated, built a nest and raised a family and I still hadn’t the foggiest notion which dead tree or which chimney held the secret.

My twilight vigils, covering a period of eleven weeks, had come to nothing of a positive nature, so I gave them up. Out of habit, however, I still glanced at the sky when the sun had set. During August and September I saw the Vaux’ swift on a dozen occasions, always just a single bird and probably the same one each time. On September 22, the Coyote fire started early in the afternoon and by sundown every schoolchild in Santa Barbara, Montecito and Goleta knew it was going to be a bad one. Many families living in the foothills were already packing their belongings in cars and trucks and borrowed trailers. Ken had the rainbirds going on our roof — these had been installed after the previous fire on the advice of the Montecito fire chief to all canyon dwellers — but the water pressure was dropping and the fire was racing toward us across the explosively dry mountains. I walked up the road to consult a neighbor about what we ought to do. As we stood watching the flames, the Vaux’ swift suddenly darted over our heads.

“Did you see that?” my neighbor screamed above the roar of helicopters. “It must have been a bat.”

It hardly seemed the time or place for a bird lesson, so I agreed that it must, indeed, have been a bat.

We didn’t see the bird again that year. Vaux’ swifts are said to winter in the tropics and I have a notion that he headed straight for some nice, wet rainforest.

The following spring the migrating Vaux’ swifts either missed us entirely, or, since the weather was unusually warm and clear, passed over us at a great height. We saw none of the birds at all until our friend of the previous year arrived back on April 25. He fell immediately into the same pattern, appearing out of nowhere to cross the darkening sky between the two largest Monterey pines, and becoming as regular a part of evening as the scent of star jasmine and the sound of May beetles striking the windows when I turned on the lights.

This swift, then, was the bird I was waiting for when I learned firsthand of the caution of the great horned owls in the presence of gunfire. The swift showed up on schedule, stayed within eye range for all of five seconds and disappeared.

I sat still, hoping for another glimpse of him and some inkling of where he was hiding out. My chances of finding a nest were considerably better than last year, since a great many of the dead trees in the area had been burned to the ground during the Coyote fire. Suddenly I heard what I thought was a shot. Then further up the canyon I saw a rocket-type firecracker rising in the air. Fortunately it was more crack than fire — it fizzled out at less than a hundred feet. Firecrackers are illegal in California and particularly dangerous in heavily wooded foothill areas, so I tried to determine the exact location of the explosion before reporting it to the fire department. Suddenly I saw the male great horned owl swoop past our house at chimney height. He didn’t make a sound. About three minutes later the female followed him, also without a sound. Always before when we’d seen the owls they had alerted us to their presence by calling to each other. That night, and every night for the next two weeks, though there were no more “shots,” the owls remembered the first one and passed through our canyon as mute as moths.

Year after year Santa Barbara’s Christmas bird count would list one screech owl. Readers of Audubon Field Notes, where the Christmas-count results are published, couldn’t be expected to know that it was always the same screech owl. The little bird’s name was Hermie, which stood not for Herman or Hermione but for Hermit since no one was sure what sex he belonged to, though he was referred to as “he.”

And a hermit he was indeed. Some years ago he established squatter’s rights to a four-inch tunnel that ran horizontally under the apex of the red tile roof of the Natural History Museum. This setup was so ideal that no mere chemical urge could compel him to share it with a partner. Or perhaps he’d already had a partner and lost her, and since screech owls mate for life, he was destined to spend the rest of his days alone. At any rate he made the best of things.

Hermie’s quarters, warm and dry in the winter, cool in summer and secure from enemies, permitted him to have a rather lively social life for an owl. When he felt like fraternizing he would come to the entrance hole of his tunnel and sit in the sun and watch the people going in and out of the front door of the museum. If they seemed particularly interesting he would watch with both eyes; if not, he would close one eye. Often he went to sleep entirely and at these times, without the glitter and movement of his eyes to draw attention to him, he looked like part of the building and even people who knew he lived there had trouble spotting him. He didn’t like too much attention. When a group of noisy schoolchildren pointed at him or bird watchers trained their binoculars on him with too much interest he retreated with sour dignity into the fastness of his tunnel.

The curiosity which can kill cats also kills many birds. This is what started Hermie’s trouble — though it was human ignorance that caused his death, as it does for so many wild creatures. Flying down to investigate some workmen who were putting in a new parking lot for the museum, Hermie got trapped in the wet blacktop. One of the workmen, seeing Hermie’s struggles, killed him with a shovel “to put him out of his misery,” a phrase that can cover a lot of unnecessary killings. And Hermie’s was unnecessary. Waldo Abbott, now curator of ornithology at the museum, says that if the little owl had been brought to his lab, no more than fifty yards away, the blacktop could have been removed from his feathers quite easily and Hermie would still be occupying his penthouse.

In heartening contrast to the shovel-wielding workman are the people like Gloria Forsyth, a friend of mine, who found a very young baby cliff swallow which had fallen out of its nest under the eaves of the Forsyth’s house. The experts whose advice Gloria asked about raising the tiny creature all told her the same thing: forget it, it’s too difficult to keep a baby swallow adequately supplied with insects. Gloria was not easily discouraged and she had, moreover, a steady source of food because she kept riding horses. For the next two weeks she could be seen at any time of the day walking around the corral, swatting horse flies, picking them up carefully from the ground with eyebrow tweezers and placing them in a little gold pillbox. Neighbors and passers-by must have received a distinctly odd impression but the swallow thrived, and the last Gloria saw of it, it flew expertly off her forefinger toward the corral. Sic transit Gloria’s hirundo.

There is something both absurd and awesome about the very tiny owls. The elf owl is the smallest and has the distinction of being the only member of the family in which the male is as large as the female — though at five inches it hardly seems to matter. The elf owl caught by a flashlight beam as he peers out of his hole in a saguaro makes a captivating sight, but it is the pygmy owl which intrigues me most. The size of a sparrow, he has the courage and skill of an eagle. He has been known to kill birds as large as a meadowlark, mammals as large as squirrels and reptiles a foot long.

Pygmy is different from other owls in many respects. He does not share the gross eating habits of the larger ones who devour their victims, bone and feather, and fur and teeth, and regurgitate the indigestible parts in the form of pellets. Pygmy eats daintily (though not in quite the same manner as Tiny, the burrowing owl at the museum, who holds his food in one claw and lifts it to his mouth like a picnicker eating a chicken leg) and he leaves no pellets to betray his presence.

There are other differences. Pygmy is unperturbed by the approach and observation of people. He hunts by day and his flight is different from that of most owls, both in manner and sound. He makes a distinct noise as he swoops down on his prey because his wings lack the adaptation of nocturnal owls, the sound-deadening filaments on the feather tips. There has been some disagreement about whether this adaptation was intended to permit the night owl to sneak quietly up on his victims or to make it easier for him to use his sense of hearing to locate his victims in the dark. The latter seems more reasonable. It would surely be inconsistent on the part of nature to silence an owl’s wings to conceal his presence and do nothing about moderating his voice, which gives him away to every mouse in a meadow miles away.

The pygmy owl is especially intriguing to me because, after years passed without one being reported in our area, Jewell Kriger and I found a pair nesting in Refugio Canyon. Refugio Canyon is perhaps best known to birders for its yellow-breasted chats, which can nearly always be found in May and June in the willow thickets along the stream. (The canyon is also known for its tarantula migration, an event not likely to appeal to many spectators.) Sometimes patience is necessary to see the chats. It certainly was on that day. We could hear them sounding off, first from one side of the road, then the other, but we couldn’t manage to get one in the binoculars. This spring repertoire of raucous noises contrasts sharply with the absolute silence of the chat who visits us every fall for a month to feed on grapes and bananas.

Suddenly Jewell said in a rather surprised voice, “I didn’t know sparrows would eat mice...”

Nor did I. I focused my binoculars on the limb of the dead oak tree she was looking at and the “sparrow” turned his head slowly and transfixed me with a pair of the brightest yellow eyes I’ve ever seen.

The little owl showed not the faintest sign of nervousness or alarm at our intrusion. He casually resumed his business, which was not eating the mouse but removing certain inedible portions of it. I began to suspect that he had a mate nearby and that the mouse must be intended for her. He was in no hurry to let me know for sure. He picked fastidiously at the mouse’s carcass, turning every now and then to look at Jewell and me in a manner that reminded me of an earnest biology teacher giving a lesson in dissection and checking to see if his pupils were paying attention.

Meanwhile we weren’t the only creatures to discover the presence of the pygmy owl. Suddenly the air around us was filled with wingbeats and the sounds of avian alarm and anger, buzzes and cluckings and rattles and squeaks and squawks. The swallows appeared first and were most abundant, tree swallows and violet-greens and cliffs. One would swoop down on the owl so low it almost touched him, then rise in the air to let the next one swoop down, until there was a steady strafing of outraged swallows. Other birds hastened to join the action — Bullock’s orioles, Oregon juncos, ash-throated flycatchers, red-winged blackbirds, black-headed grosbeaks — until the place was a riot of sound and color and motion. Many of the birds were larger than the owl, but if he was disturbed he didn’t show it. He calmly continued his task with only the occasional blink to indicate his thoughts: Look at these idiots railing at me when I’m only doing my duty...

After about ten minutes he flew to a hole fifteen or twenty feet up in the main trunk of a dead sycamore tree. He dropped the remains of the mouse over the edge of the hole so that its tail and hind legs hung down, then he let out a sound which was half-hoot, half-whistle, and flew down low, straight across the road, and out of sight. Except for a dozen or so swallows who followed him, the other birds dispersed and went about their business.

We kept our binoculars focused on the hole in the sycamore and as we watched, the mouse seemed suddenly to come to life and start crawling over the edge into the hole, wagging its tail back and forth. It was an eerie sight indeed, even though one was aware that Mrs. Pygmy was the principal behind it. We waited, hoping she would show herself, but she didn’t. Many times on subsequent occasions I saw her yellow and black eyes peering out of the little round hole in the sycamore. She looked like a jack-o’-lantern set in the window of a tree house at Halloween. Her eyes, incidentally, appeared quite different from the male’s. Since she spent most of her time in the darkness of the nesting cavity, her pupils were greatly dilated and the narrow yellow rim of iris seemed to have been added as an afterthought by someone with a dab of leftover paint.

Jewell and I decided to postpone finding the chats until another day so that we could hurry back to town and put the pygmy owl on the Rare Bird Alert.

The R.B.A. was started in Santa Barbara in 1963. It works simply. People who sign up for it are given cards with a list of six or seven names and phone numbers. When they are contacted by the person whose name precedes theirs on the card they must contact the next person listed below. Thus, in as little as fifteen minutes, every eager bird-watcher in town can be informed of the whereabouts of a rare bird. There is one essential rule — the birds so found must not be molested or disturbed in any way.

In certain other localities the R.B.A. has been sadly abused. Collectors for museums and universities have operated with such callous disregard for birds and birders alike that many expert birders no longer report their findings to the R.B.A. This will continue to be the case, I am assured, until collecting is outlawed in the United States as it was some time ago in England when the English became aware that a little collecting here and a little collecting there added up to an awful lot of dead birds. Collectors actually exterminated one species of hummingbird, Loddige’s racket-tail, before naturalists had a chance to study the birds in life. Only about forty California condors survive in the world today, though there are 112 dead ones in public collections and nobody knows how many more in private collections. I think we can safely assume that very few of them died of heart attacks. But perhaps the prize for the most stupid act of collecting must go to the famous ornithologist who saw the last authenticated flock of Carolina parakeets in 1904 in Florida. There were thirteen birds in the flock and he shot four of them.

Biologists themselves are becoming alarmed at the way many of their colleagues waste our natural resources. At the upper levels there is much unnecessary, even foolish, duplication in research. At the lower levels, class experiments all too often involve senseless destruction of mammals, birds and marine life. I recently came across, in an ornithological journal, the report of a study of hybridization between Baltimore and Bullock orioles as evidenced by differences in the amount of black and orange pigmentation. The birds could easily have been mist-netted, examined, banded for future observation and released. Instead, 623 orioles were collected — and this was for only one study among many done on the same subject.

Biology, which means the study of life, has come more and more to mean thanatology, the study of death. Biologist Farley Mowat wrote of being “sorely puzzled by the paradox that many of my contemporaries tended to shy as far away from living things as they could get, and chose to restrict themselves instead to the aseptic atmosphere of laboratories where they used dead — often very dead — animal material as their subject matter.”

To an increasing number of people, collecting is a dirty word.

I would never have reported the pygmy owl on the Rare Bird Alert if I hadn’t been sure it was safe from collectors. Jewell made a note of the time of day, the mileage on the odometer, the species and height of the tree containing the nesting hole, and so on, while I hunted around for a marker to place on the side of the road. I found a section of board that had been painted red. This was a piece of good luck. (Every year there is talk of our local Audubon branch designing simple markers and distributing them to members who spend considerable time in the field. Nothing ever comes of it, probably because most of us have learned that you find the rare birds only when you’re not prepared for them.)

Some members go out on just a few of the bird alerts, but there are others who will instantly drop whatever they’re doing and set out to wade through a marsh for a wood stork, climb a mountain for a white-headed woodpecker or go to sea in a dense fog looking for a Xantus’s murrelet.

Perhaps the most difficult alerts to follow through are the warblers, since they are so tiny and so active. Easterners accustomed to seeing warblers in migration through leafless trees aren’t happy about having to locate our California birds in the dense foliage of live oaks and sycamores and eucalyptus. Many warblers reported on the R.B.A. are never seen by anyone but the original finder. Quite a few, however, are. A rare palm warbler, put out on the R.B.A. as seen “in Gaviota State Park, near picnic table No. 9; look low and watch for tail wagging,” stayed all fall, seldom venturing even as far as picnic table No. 10. A chestnut-sided warbler — a first record for Santa Barbara — spotted by the Hylands on a lemonade bush along the bridle trail in Hope Ranch, was found the following day and the day after by Nelson Metcalf and Ken and myself in the very same bush.

The pygmy owls, committed as they were to a fixed location which was well marked, proved the easiest of all the R.B.A. birds to locate. The tiny pair became our star attractions, all the more so after Nelson Metcalf discovered that if the male was off hunting when visitors arrived, he could be coaxed back by an imitation of his call notes. It didn’t matter how poor the imitation was — I’ve never learned even to whistle properly, but by pursing my lips as if I were about to whistle, then saying “hoo-hoo” instead, I could always evoke a response from the little owl, who would answer from a considerable distance and come flying in with his obstreperous escort of swallows.

Refugio Canyon is too far away to permit anyone with a job to perform to keep the owls under close observation. But they must have raised their young in a manner satisfactory to them because they returned the following year to the same nesting hole accompanied by what surely appeared to be the same escort of swallows. Eventually a road construction crew bulldozed over the red marker I’d put out, but by that time every birder within a hundred miles knew exactly where to find a pair of pygmy owls.

Another member of the owl family, much rarer than the pygmy and probably the most difficult to find of all eighteen North American owls, couldn’t be put on the Rare Bird Alert because private property was involved, and the owners, after losing a valuable colt to a trespassing hunter, had the area posted and patrolled.

It was a canyon near Santa Maria, with steep sides heavily wooded, the preferred habitat of this particular species of owl. The trees along the stream were mainly cottonwoods, willows and sycamores, and on the slopes, mature oaks, both deciduous and evergreen, with an abundant undergrowth of poison oak, more popular with owls than with owlers. Mary and Tom Hyland had received permission to watch birds on the property, and it was here on an April twilight, in 1966, that they came upon a pair of spotted owls. With the enthusiastic help of Mickey and Ed Williams, the Hylands kept the birds under observation for four months.

Mary had called me from Santa Maria in late April when she and Tom found the owls, and again in May to urge me to drive up and see them. Once the owls were located early in the morning in a particular place, Mary said, they could almost certainly be depended on to stay in the same place for the balance of the day. The trick was to locate them. Many owls are seen more often by day than by night — the burrowing, the pygmy, the short-eared, the snowy, the hawk owl — but spotted owls are nocturnal. The best time to find them is at night when they call to each other as they hunt. The best time to observe them, however, is in the daytime while they doze in a tree.

Though I certainly wanted to see the owls I wasn’t keen about driving seventy-five miles by freeway, then searching through a remote canyon on foot to try to find two silent, motionless birds endowed with almost perfect protective coloration. I decided to wait.

On June 7, Mary called to tell me that while none of the observers had been able to find a nest, the evidence that one existed had been photographed the previous day — two baby spotted owls perched on the limb of a valley oak some fifteen feet above the ground. How the babies, still in natal down without tail or wing feathers, had gotten out of the nest and onto the limb of the oak tree was a mystery. Presumably the parent birds moved them because when I visited the canyon the next morning, only a single baby owl was in evidence, and according to Mary, he was in a different tree from the one he’d shared with his sibling the previous day.

It was 9:30 a.m., a time for all nocturnal creatures to be asleep. Baby Spot evidently hadn’t been told this. He was awake, his large dark eyes wide open and as luminous as two smoked agates. He was about twelve inches long, a little more than half-size, and so fuzzy all over that he appeared to be wrapped in cotton candy which someone had colored light beige instead of pink. The presence of five observers — Mary, Mickey Williams, Jewell Kriger, Nelson Metcalf and me — didn’t alarm him in the least. He dozed off while we watched him, his claws hooked securely around the limb of the oak tree, his head sunk into his shoulders, giving him a completely neckless appearance. With neck and eyes hidden he looked not so much like a bird as like a kind of large oval-shaped fungus growing out of the tree.

Thinking that Baby Spot was settled for some time, we decided to drive further up the canyon to a meadow where Mary had recently seen a blue grosbeak and a flock of the tiny, temperamental Laurence goldfinches. We missed the grosbeak, an uncommon summer visitor in our part of the state, but we found the goldfinches, the largest flock I’ve ever seen. Some two hundred of them were feeding on the seeds of low-growing plants none of us could identify.

Here, beside the meadow, we ate our lunch and watched the goldfinches eat theirs. Then after another long, futile search for the grosbeak we returned to the oak tree where we’d seen Baby Spot perched that morning. It was empty. The night baby who was supposed to sleep all day, who had no wings to fly and no tail to steer, had somehow managed to reach another oak tree, some seventy-five feet from the first one, and settle on a branch about twelve feet from the ground. Had his parents moved him? If so, why? And where were they now? And what had happened to the other owlet, Twin Spot?

Baby Spot was awake and he was hungry. He twitched and fidgeted on the branch, pecking fretfully at his toes like a little boy biting his nails. Every now and then he let out a long sigh which was no more an owl sound than the sound of any young animal wanting food and attention.

We waited for one or both of the parents to respond to Spot’s needs but they failed to appear. The amount of information I’d been able to obtain about spotted owls from my bird books was meager. By all accounts, though, the birds were tame, stupidly tame, in fact, so it seemed unlikely that the presence of observers was keeping the parents from attending to Baby Spot. To make sure, however, we moved a considerable distance away to watch the oak tree and its forlorn occupant through binoculars.

It was five o’clock. I had a most uneasy feeling that the three missing owls had met with disaster. There was no need to communicate these thoughts to my companions. Their expressions made it clear that they were thinking along the same lines: if Baby Spot was an orphan it would be up to one of us to take him home and look after him until he was grown and fully feathered and could hunt for his own food.

Before such a step was taken, however, we decided to do more investigating. Mary and Mickey were wearing heavy hiking boots so they volunteered to climb up the hill through the poison oak in search of clues. Baby Spot, still fidgeting back and forth on the oak limb and intermittently chewing at his toes, watched their approach with minimal interest.

Meanwhile Nelson had reached the tree where we’d seen the owl that morning, and it was he who found the first bunch of owl feathers. They were the feathers of a baby spotted owl and they were scattered all over the ground underneath the tree. Not just five or six of them, but whole handfuls. There were no hawks in the area likely to take on a spotted owl, and it seemed likely that the other predators, such as bobcats and coyotes, preferred game that was tastier, more plentiful and easier to catch. That left the most undisciplined and dangerous predator of all — man.

“A hunter or a collector,” Mickey said quietly. “To a dead bird it hardly matters.”

Mary suggested that since we weren’t getting anywhere standing around worrying, Nelson and Jewell and I might as well drive back to Santa Barbara, and she and Mickey would go and make dinner for their respective families, then return to the canyon at dusk to see how Baby Spot was faring.

I reached home about the time they were setting out for the canyon again. After a quick meal I assembled all the available information concerning the spotted owl.

Most bird books gave it either no mention at all or merely a sentence indicating it was the Far Western counterpart of the Eastern barred owl. In Birds of America, edited by T. Gilbert Pearson, and Birds of the Pacific Coast by Ralph Hoffman, it rated a paragraph. I found only two accounts that were by any means adequate, in A. C. Bent’s Life Histories of North American Birds, and W. L. Dawson’s Birds of California. Both Bent and Dawson quoted the same sources, articles published in the ornithological journal Condor, one by Lawrence Peyton (1910), the other by Donald R. Dickey (1914).

Dawson also included two of Dickey’s photographs of young spotted owls. The picture of a single owl, a dead ringer for Baby Spot, was captioned “A Feather-Bed Baby.” The other picture showed the same young owl with his sibling perched on an oak stump some fifteen feet from the ground and a hundred yards from the nest. Underneath this picture was a quote from Dickey’s article: “That the young could have reached the spot unaided seems incredible.”

The alternative he suggested was that the parents, fearing for the safety of their offspring, had moved them. But he didn’t seem too happy with this explanation. Faced with the identical situation fifty-two years later, I wasn’t too happy with the explanation either. Baby Spot, while still technically a baby, would have been an awkward load to haul down from a perch twenty feet in an oak tree, across seventy-five feet of rough terrain and up twelve feet into another oak tree. And, even if spotted owls were as stupid as their detractors claimed, what would be the point of such a transfer? It wasn’t enough of a move to foil any predator worthy of the name, and the second tree offered no better concealment than the first.

Later that night the fifty-two-year mystery was solved in a ten-minute phone call from Mary Hyland in Santa Maria.

She and Mickey had returned to the canyon shortly before dusk to find Baby Spot in the same tree as we’d left him. He was still alone and obviously hungrier than ever, and to call attention to his plight he was flouncing around on the oak branch from one end to the other. Perhaps the approach of two observers added to his distraction. At any rate he flounced a bit too far and too fancy, somersaulted off the branch and landed on the ground below in a flurry of feathers.

Mary and Mickey stood motionless with shock. Not so Baby Spot, who seemed quite unperturbed as if the experience was nothing new for him. First he shook himself vigorously to get rid of more feathers which had been loosened by his fall. Then, with a gait that was half-waddle, half-swagger, he headed back to the tree trunk and began climbing. (Since learning about the climbing tactics of owls, I have watched a flicker, too young to fly, climb a large palm tree in the same manner, using both beak and claws. And condor expert Ian McMillan tells of seeing these enormous birds ascend to the tops of trees in order to gain the altitude necessary for take-off.) It was a slow, laborious climb but both tree and bird were equipped for it. The owl’s sharply curved claws and beak fitted into the deep grooves of the oak bark.

Up, up went Baby Spot and when he had regained his perch in the oak tree he promptly closed his eyes and went to sleep. But within five minutes he was awake again and the whole performance started over, the fidgeting, the flouncing, and finally, to the dismay of his observers, the falling. For the second time in half an hour owl feathers filled the air and littered the ground. And another mystery was solved — the origin of all the feathers we’d found that afternoon. They belonged to Baby Spot, and it seemed probable that if he kept up his present rate he would become the first bald owl in ornithological history.

Once more he began his long, slow ascent of the tree trunk. He was about a third of the way up when through the canyon came a sound that was equally welcome to all three of the listeners. It was a series of notes, higher in pitch than the call of the great horned owl, and not so much a who, who, who, who, as a what, what, what.

It was almost totally dark by this time, and what took place in the oak tree was a kind of shadow play with sound effects. The parent owls arrived in a fluster of what-what’s and whistles, and another noise that sounded to the imaginative Mickey like the squeaking of a mouse. Perhaps the other young owl heard it, too, for he suddenly appeared out of nowhere, took his place beside Baby Spot on the oak branch — where he had spent the day remained his secret — and the little family was united again. Soon the parents went off in search of more food and the babies were left alone. They sat quietly side by side, looking like twin ghosts resting up after a haunting.

The Hylands and the Williamses kept the spotted owl family under observation until mid-August when the opening of deer hunting season made the canyon too dangerous to linger in. By this time the young owls were ready for independence, with wing and tail feathers well developed. The last I heard of them, they were still haunting their wooded canyon.

I have since had news concerning two other owls mentioned previously in this chapter. Someone cut the wire of the cage where Tiny lived, the burrowing owl who was a pet at the Museum of Natural History for years. Perhaps it was a senseless piece of vandalism, or perhaps Tiny’s escape was engineered by someone of good faith and poor judgment who didn’t realize the little bird had been raised in captivity and couldn’t survive by himself.

On a happier note, the living quarters under the museum roof which were long left vacant after the death of the screech owl Hermie have been found, approved and occupied by another screech owl. Possibly among owls, as among humans, the dwelling defines the dweller. Hermie Too has developed the same peculiarties and social mannerisms as his predecessor, and most visitors to the museum don’t know he isn’t the original.

Volumes could be written on the subject of the differences between the sexes among birds. Space limitations permit me only to emphasize that there are no hard and fast rules.

Usually the male is larger and stronger than the female, yet most of the male predators — eagles, hawks, falcons, harriers, buteos — are smaller than their mates and look to them for leadership.

Though singing is the prerogative of the male of most species, female grosbeaks sing, and so do cardinals, robins and mockingbirds. The dipper sometimes joins her mate in a duet, as do the females of several species of owl. Recently a pair of great horned owls put on a concert while sitting, appropriately enough, on our television antenna. Perhaps it wasn’t singing in the Metropolitan Opera sense, but I’ve heard human performances I’ve enjoyed less.

In at least one species of bird the female not only sings, she can do so with her mouth full. On a February morning I watched a pair of house finches during an early stage of their courtship. The female, who was being fed by the male, several times broke into song, enough like the male’s song to be identifiable, but softer and incomplete.

Usually it is the male bird who makes advances to the female, by displaying in various ways or by presenting her with nesting materials. But here, too, there are buts. Some female birds, like the skua, present grass and twigs to the males at courting time, and mutual display is the rule rather than the exception among sea birds.

One spring I watched a pair of mockingbirds put on what I thought was a mutual display beside the road in front of our house. The stage was an area about six feet square and the mockers stood facing each other, heads and tails held high, so that both birds looked larger than normal and of somewhat different shape. One of the birds hopped into the center of the stage and bowed briskly. The other did the same. The first bird gave a little hop to the left and bowed, the second repeated the movements exactly. This went on for some time, with the birds often meeting chest to chest in a seemingly amorous posture. The performance was both solemn and funny, and an onlooker couldn’t help being reminded of the fact that many folk dances originated in attempts to copy the movements of birds.

When I first witnessed this mockingbird exhibition it was during early spring and I assumed the dancers were male and female, and the dance was intended to take advantage of the difference. This assumption was shaken when, the following October, I saw a pair going through precisely the same ritual. Perhaps October eyes are different, unblurred by the winds of March, the rains of April, the wild weather of the heart in spring. At any rate my autumn eyes saw the birds as two males engaged in a bluffing match to decide territorial boundaries.

Since that time I’ve witnessed many such mockingbird rituals. When the same two birds were involved, the arena was usually the same patch of ground and the demonstration occasionally ended with feathers flying, but more often with the dignified retreat of one of the contestants. There can be little doubt that these were territorial disputes, or what Edward A. Armstrong calls “hostility displays, slightly socialised.” I say little doubt rather than no doubt because among birds, as among human beings, love-making exhibits some striking similarities to hate-making.

Mr. Armstrong also points out, in Bird Display and Behaviour, that among certain birds like terns, cormorants, grebes and band-tailed pigeons, even the climactic act of mounting doesn’t belong exclusively to the male.

A friend was recently lamenting that the task of differentiating between the human sexes was becoming more and more intricate, what with males coiffed and perfumed like females and females dressed like males. I suggested that the only really certain method was to wait and see which one of a pair went to the hospital to have the baby. We might do well to apply this to birds: the one that lays the eggs is the female.