Owl Watching

On getting caught on the feathery, adorable, cold, calculating stare.

Photo by Frank Cone

Dear reader,

The owl stepped gingerly around the egg, plucking and fussing with the nest. Fluffing the moss. Nesting. Her single egg glowed white on the screen of my phone, and from the way she was acting, I bet that she wasn’t done. Not that I’d ever seen an owl nest before, but birds sometimes take a few days to lay their eggs, and that fussing around is where the word nesting comes from. Readying a space for something.

This was my first glimpse of the great horned owls that moved into the raptor cam nest near where I live in South Carolina. The camera was set up a few years ago to watch the bald eagle nest, and I had checked it out once or twice while there were eagles there. The owls were a surprise, so I checked them out as soon as I heard they were there. And I kept the tab open on my phone (one of about thirty that I just can’t seem to close yet, but that’s another story).

A few days later, Matt and I were hanging out in the garage, talking and listening to records, when I told him about the owls in the nest. I opened the website on my phone and there she was, sitting alert and still in the place where I’d seen the single egg before. She faced away from the camera, out onto the dark expanse, and I wondered what she could see, gazing out on the world with her powerful, all-seeing eyes.

After a few still moments, she lifted up on her surprisingly long legs, revealing what was now two eggs. I was thrilled to have been right. But then she hopped up to the edge of the nest and took flight, leaving the camera’s view and throwing me for a loop. Where was she going? Wasn’t she supposed to stay on the eggs? Where was her mate?

The owl was gone, and while I stared nervously, Matt googled for answers. It turns out, responsible owl parents do leave the eggs for little breaks. We hadn’t necessarily just witnessed a mother abandoning her young. But the limit of the nest camera meant I had no idea where she’d gone or what she was doing, and so I worried about all the troubles that could befall an owl out flying around in the night. And staring at those two unguarded eggs, exposed to the darkness and undoubtedly cooling off on that cold winter night, I said to Matt, “Watching these owls is going to break my heart, isn’t it?”

He works in wildlife management, and so he of all people couldn’t tell me it wouldn’t. Believe me when I say you should never underestimate the difficult lives of wild animals. The world is a hard place. It even warns viewers on the raptor cam website that nature can be difficult to watch. But, thank goodness, less than fifteen minutes later, she swooped in from off-camera and carefully got comfortable over top of the eggs again. I went to bed that night feeling as if a crisis had been averted and comfortable that this owl seemed to know what she was doing.

She sat on the eggs for about a month, and during this time I got in the habit of visiting her when I woke in the middle of the night, as I tend to do. Instead of checking my email or social feeds and letting my brain spin around human concerns, I opened the raptor cam. The sounds of the outdoors at night would fill my dark bedroom. And on the screen, the owls conducted their usually secret owl lives.

Owl viewing only got more interesting after the eggs hatched. At first, the owlets were like puffballs with bare, troubling faces. Without feathers to soften all the sharpness, a bird face is a frightful thing. Their tails, instead of a fan of feathers, were more like that of a bunny, and absolutely as darling to see. Their heads and necks wobbled and swayed with their shaky, irresistible new baby movements. I’ve visited an animal cam or two, but these owls hooked me.

Once I checked on them in the very early morning and they were both asleep, flat on their stomachs in that odd way they do, and so still that I was relieved to see the subtle rise and fall of their breathing, the same way I felt upon seeing it on my own sleeping babies. As I watched on my phone, the wind ruffling their fluff and the tree tops gently swaying, the owlet closest to the camera twitched and raised a tiny, curved wing, stretching and then resettling in sleep. That teeny wing was a miniature promise of what that sweet little ball of sleeping fluff would become—something both adorable and badass.

Speaking of badass, I missed it live, but the newspaper published a video clip on their website that has since appeared in my nightmares. Apparently, the nest tree is outfitted with several cameras because the view is different from the one I’d grown used to seeing, which was like the picture window on the front of a house. In the video, the camera angle is higher, looking down on the nest from above. The bright morning sun is shining on the mother owl’s mottled brown and buff back. Something off-screen to the right gets her attention. She stands, fans out her wings, and puffs up every feather on her body, like she’s making a wall of herself. A shadow moves in the corner of the screen, and whatever it is, she’s watching it. Then a bald eagle falls into the frame, yellow talons outstretched with sickening intent. And the owl that I love leaps into the air and grabs for the intruder, flipping backward as her feet fly out and make contact, pushing, obviously, with everything she has. There is a flurry of feathers as the two birds, locked in the throes of battle, fall from the nest and out of the camera’s view.

There’s no sound on the video, and seconds tick by on the little clock in the corner. The fluffy, vulnerable owlets are curled in the bottom of the nest. Whatever was happening off-camera, it had me worried. A bald eagle weighs almost two times as much as a great horned owl. Any injury could put the whole lot in danger. Then a shadow moves from below the nest toward the upper corner of the screen. Next, something feathered though mostly obscured by the tree moves to a branch below the nest. It’s the owl, thank goodness. She climbs onto a higher branch and looks up with her ever-placid face. Then she spreads her wings and flies up to perch on the rim of the nest. She checks her babies, then, watching the sky, settles back over them. The video clip was forty-one harrowing seconds long. No matter how many times I watch it, I feel the same panic and surge of relief of a crisis narrowly averted.

As the owlets grew and got stronger, little feathers replaced the fluff, first on the tail and wings, then on the face. They started looking more like owls and less pitiful. They also got busier, bopping around the nest and peering down over the edge. The mother was often away from the nest, hunting to feed them; I could tell just by looking at her little guys that she had her hands or wings or talons or whatever full. Her mate, though I only saw pictures of him in the newspaper and later on the web page, also helped feed the family. And the nest filled with little carcasses of squirrels and rats. One night, one of the owlets was playing with a rat body stiff with rigor mortis, kicking it around the nest, giving it little shakes in its beak, playing at killing while the sibling spun its head almost all the way around to watch.

Another time maybe the mother (or perhaps it was the father, I don’t know enough to tell the difference) had just returned with dinner because the two little ones were gathered around and ripping enthusiastically at something that I couldn’t see between them. During this thankfully obscured process, the mother’s gaze fell directly on the camera for a few moments. It is easy to see, when an owl’s eyes fall on you, even through a camera, why they are characterized as wise. Some animals have a curious gaze; others more of a blank stare. Owls look at you like they already know, have already sized you up. It’s a humbling gaze, even when it isn’t really directed at you at all.

Easter morning, I got up early to put out my kids’ baskets. They’re big enough to sleep in these days, so I didn’t have to do it the night before. But while I waited for them, I checked the raptor cam and the nest was empty. I knew the owlets had been exploring outside the nest. I’d seen one climbing up a branch the last time I’d looked, so I knew it wouldn’t be long. And they probably weren’t far. Now that they’re mobile, the streaming camera switches from the nest view to others in the tree so you can see the babies, not so babyish anymore, exploring. The parents are still feeding them while they learn to hunt and be owls all on their own. But before long, they’ll be all grown up.

Though I didn’t know it at the time, my last glimpse of all three of them together in the nest was a late afternoon about a week ago. During the day, the nest had more context. Instead of the black and white of night, the camera picked up full color. Humanity was obvious below the treetops; pavement and the sounds of not-so-distant traffic combined with birdsong. The camera showed the mother’s backside. The breeze rustled her feathers. She was still except her head moved like she was watching the world below. Her one wing was outstretched, wrapped around the babies tucked against her. And I’ll be honest, my heart is a little broken that they can’t stay just like that forever.

Thank you for reading!

Melinda

P.S. The other day I reread Annie Dillard’s classic essay about the total eclipse. If you, like me, highly anticipate next week’s astronomical phenomenon, you can read it in her collection, Teaching a Stone to Talk, on The Atlantic’s website if you have an account, or at this pdf link. Just for fun, I might scream when it happens!