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.