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August 4, 2007

STEPHANIE SALTER: The sound of the owl living in my yard almost makes me cry

By Stephanie Salter

TERRE HAUTE — For an incurable city dweller like me, one of the best things about living in a temperate climate — four very distinguishable seasons — is the way nature can grab you by the collar, sit you down in a corner chair and remind you that you and all your urban neighbors are really just leasing space here.

The most recent collar grab began earlier this summer. Like the best of nature’s reminders, it sneaked up on me.

Time: About 10 p.m. on a weekday.

Place: My living room, a few blocks north of Collett Park.

Scene: The windows are open, but it is very still and dark on the other side of the screens. I am stretched out on the sofa reading a newspaper and half-listening to satellite radio.

A sound such as I have never heard invades my consciousness. It is like a rhythmic wheeze, but not from a human being, and it is remarkably loud. A bit spooked, I peer through the blackness of my front yard, trying to pinpoint the noise.

It seems to be coming from the grove of tall pines and bushes in the center of my yard. I try a flashlight. Ha. Its impotent little beam is immediately swallowed up by the dense foliage. Emboldened, I get in my car, turn it around in the driveway and point the high beams toward the trees.

Ha again. The mystery continues.

This scene was repeated for several nights — minus the searchlights. One morning I hailed my next-door neighbor, Jim, and asked if he’d been hearing anything strange of late. I tried to describe the sound: “It sounds like a coyote giving birth or something.”

Jim started to make the wheezing-whine.

“It’s that young male owl that’s come here,” he said. “Haven’t you seen him? He’s a beauty.”

A few days later, while I was on the phone with a friend in New York City, a shadow passed over my back windows and then the front ones. I ran to the door and saw the unmistakable spread of wings gliding toward the tree tops.

“Holy ---!” I told my friend in New York. “I’ve got an owl living in my yard!”

The best was yet to come.

I believe I got to hear the owl say his first “words.” It was night again, and he was doing his wheezing thing outside my windows. Then, the wheeze just slid into a tentative but low-pitched “Hooo-ooh. Hooo-ooh.” I nearly burst into tears.

My neighbor, Jim, has been talking to the owl quite a bit over the last few weeks, drawing him closer with each set of hoots and making major eye contact with him.

I managed it once for about 90 seconds until I stupidly started speaking human and referred to the bird as “Mr. Owl.” He threw me the most disgusted look and flew off into the woods at the end of my street. Who could blame him?

Despite the handful of taupe-and-white striped feathers dropped in my yard, I’m still not certain what kind of owl it is. Jim doesn’t know or much care. (Probably a male bonding thing.)

I called Steve Lima, an ornithologist and professor of ecology at Indiana State University, and tried to describe the owl as best I could. Lima did great imitations of the two most likely candidates, a great horned owl and a barred owl.

The former emits a fairly monotonous series of hoots, the latter delivers a real tune with several notes and a distinctive cadence. They both sounded possible.

“Does he have a white face?” Lima asked.

“I don’t know,” I said, embarrassed. “I’ve only looked at his eyes.”

Lima kindly answered my many questions about owls that are common to this area. He said it’s not rare for them to engage in hooting conversations with humans. When he’s out observing great horned owls, however, Lima said he doesn’t like to actually hold the tape recorder that’s playing their calls.

“Great horneds come right away and they might attack the recorder — take a piece of your hand,” he said.

Professor Lima told me about owl mating season — they breed in December, babies hatch in February and leave the nest around April. Until a baby is full-grown and ready to fly solo, its parents keep it close. Females are larger than males and tend to fly farther in their quest for a home.

My neighborhood owl, Lima said, may have come from many miles away and probably is “young and dumb” because he thinks he can make a home in the city — a prospect the professor says is unlikely.

“Its whole intent is to find a territory with a food supply, and it’s got to get a mate, too,” he said.

This will require the owl finding “an equally young, dumb female that’s hanging out in the city. If that’s not working out, it’ll move on,” Lima said.

“To where?” I asked.

“Just out,” said Lima, echoing the classic teenager’s answer to such a query. He added, “He’ll go out until he finds a place in the country.”

I joked about posting something for the owl on Craig’s List (and maybe match.com), but the prospect of losing my newest neighbor did not make me want to laugh.

How could I get word to the bird that we have plenty of field mice, squirrels, raccoons, opossum and moles in our area all year ’round? That’s food enough for any couple.

I thought about asking Jim to include the information in his next hooting session, but I know it doesn’t really work that way. If the owl decides not to put down roots (so to speak) in the trees on my street, there’s nothing I can do except savor the memory of his brief, youthful stay.

Nature gives and nature takes away.

Stephanie Salter can be reached at (812) 231-4229 or stephanie.salter@tribstar.com.

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