Rowdy Owls

Owls

Living next to a large river and also a creek sometimes has it’s charms, sometimes not. When I say next to, I mean on the banks of. I can look out my bedroom window and see down into the creek. Right next to is not an exaggeration. The river is about a hundred feet away.

Down here in the river bottom and along the creek there are some giant owls that live in those huge old twisted trees. These owls are about 8 feet tall and 4 feet wide and have a wingspan of around 20 feet. They have feet twice as big as your hands and talons that would make an eagle blush with envy. Worst of all is that they have loud basso profundo voices that can rattle windows from half a mile away. Listening to them you would think that their bodies are hollow, the way that their voices resonate. Their scientific name is the Gigantus Riverine Hyenus Owl. Their common name is BFOs - you can guess what that is short for.

The Hyenus part of their name comes from their mating call. These are not your urbane city owls, but more like some kind of throwback country version of a Texas redneck rabble rouser owl. If owls rode bikes these would ride Harleys and wear chains and have tattoos. Their mating call is not the quiet and soothing hoot of the city owl, it is an extremely loud raucous series of sounds that is reminiscent of the zoo’s chimpanzee cage at feeding time overlaid on a pack of hyenas that just killed food for the first time in a over month, through a loud speaker.

These owls are so big that they can carry off and swallow whole coyotes. We have coyotes all around the place too, but they stay well away from the creek. The coyotes will sometimes surround the place and start yodeling in a 360 degree circle. They are fierce sounding creatures. But let just one of these owls light up and suddenly there is total silence from everywhere, not even a cricket will chirp. The coyotes slink away and you won’t hear them again for a week.

I usually sleep with a big box fan on for background noise. It helps drown out the owls, among the other disturbing sounds in the night coming from the creek under those twisted old trees, in the moonlight; wet crunching sounds sometimes. I sleep better with the fan on.

Last night I fell asleep with the window open and during the night a little norther came through and it got cold in there. Instead of getting up and closing the window, I reached over and turned the fan off. Obviously the owls heard me turn the fan off and put a plan together.

It was so quiet without the fan that you could have heard an ant whispering secrets from a hundred yards away, the kind of quiet where you can hear your own hair growing. Three of those giant owls got together on the tree limb that is two feet outside my open window and let loose all at the same time at the top of their amplifiers. They sounded like they had gotten hold of some bad whisky. They were not only extremely loud, but they were also insane sounding, one of them was actually making a cackling kind of sound. Each one had a different style and at least two of them had to be clinically demented. Like the old man down at the store was saying about city folk; “They just ain’t right!”

I awoke levitating 3 feet above the bed, my hair standing straight out, while trying to scream like a girl but instead only making choking/gargling sounds. The owls continued for another 5 seconds or so and then…silence, even the mosquitoes were afraid to whine. The sudden and total silence was spooky, especially knowing that they were still out there somewhere, and might cut loose again at any time.

As I lay there waiting for my heart to slow down and my breathing to normalize I could hear the owls making their weird sounds as they flew up and down the creek chasing each other. Apparently it is mating season and those three owls were either A: Three males fighting over territory, or B: Two males fighting over a female with the female egging them on, or C: Some sort of wildlife version of a Ménage a Trois. This went on until my alarm went off. I never did get back to sleep; so I have been up since 3:30 this morning and I am stumbling around like a zombie.

Ahhhhh, the country life!