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.