Whit's Blog / 1000 Recordings

Gnaw

Ginger Snaps is the kind of movie that gives film critics a bad name. You watch it and it all comes back: Werewolf movies are about puberty; they're about sexuality; they're about...uhm...two hours long, and there's a lot of ugly noises. Also blood, and pieces. (Really, you know? I don't need that plastic container back now, no.) But this one's the best werewolf movie I've seen in a very, very long time.

A two-owl day

This is a good day. I started walking up at Boyer Chute in the early afternoon, about two o'clock. I have a fistful of cedar trees and pines I check there for owls, because you never know. There's a part of the woods along the chute where there's often a Great Horned Owl, but these cedar trees have yielded owl sign and no owl, at least until today. (What is "owl sign?" Owl puke and owl BM, that's what, and I'm confident that's all we really need to say about the matter. Further details available as events warrant.)

From one of the cedar trees I boosted a barn owl. Until today, I hadn't seen a Barn Owl not in a zoo or similar captive state. I don't know what to tell you about seeing an owl, except that it is rare and special. In a way it feels holy. Owls are common and necessary (barn owls in particular do away with phenomonal, evolutionarily significant tonnage of rodents, for example) but they are also resident in a path parallel to our own. Few people see them, and when they do -- or think they do -- it's memorable. If necessary, I could list the times I have seen an owl, and forget only a few. I don't know why this is, but it is.

I have sought the words to describe the barn owl, but I lack them. It lifted off from a cedar tree, and in a second I recognized the heart-shaped face, the tawny body, and I knew I had seen a bird new to me in the wild, and one that I could have seen anywhere I have ever lived. For a precious second I crossed into the nighttime world, the parallel place with no humans in it.

But it is nowhere near that simple. (Is anything?) We know that barn owls are in decline. There are fewer than there were when we started counting. The natural assumption is that we are the cause.

But this is not all about us. Barn owls live in barns, or at least they used to. But where did they live before that? When there were no barns, where did barn owls -- without the name, of course -- live? We don't know. Maybe caves. Pigeons (rock doves, actually) and barn swallows are equally mysterious. Are there fewer now than when Europeans touched the shore, and shortly thereafter took to barn-building? Fewer than when the "Indians" crossed the Ice Age isthmus?

It's all faith. I believe the owls are precious, and I saw a barn owl today. Later, I saw a Great Horned Owl in a place where I know to go to reaffirm my faith. I think I will choose just to be grateful.