Last week, on a late spring afternoon that feels like summer, I park my truck in my driveway and exit to three pairs of scowling, curious eyes that lurk in my next door neighbor’s tree.
I don’t see them at first, but they see me. These sets of eyes, I’ll find out a bit later, have a quality called “binocular vision,” which provides them with insanely taut, ninja-grade depth perception, eyes that can pierce the night’s dark veil because of how wide they can dilate.
I look up. I see one, seeing me. Then another. And still one more.
This trilogy – technically, this parliament of owls – holds my interest for the next half hour. My 7-year-old snags my binoculars. We take turns peering through the lenses, and she attempts to communicate with a barrage of her best hoot attempts while gentle come-and-go breezes ruffle the bird’s feathers. Later I hold my phone camera up to the binoculars’ eyepiece in hopes of constructing a makeshift telephoto lens. And it kind of works!
This encounter continues the following day. I watch the parliament in the tree, and they stare back, and when night comes they heed its call, dreamlike silhouettes spinning away into grey-tinged skies. The following morning, I check again, and it’s like they never left. This tree once felt like an overnight (overday?) motel for them, but now it’s got the vibe of an apartment lease.
Knock, knock. Hoo’s there?
Great horned owls, it turns out.
“They’re getting to know their wings around this time of year and were probably very proud of themselves for having a group outing,” a JCLS colleague and friend who knows their stuff when it comes to wildlife says.
Right outside your door
Sometimes I seek the wilderness out. Summer’s coming, is basically here, and the warmth does its best impression of one of the neighborhood kids from my childhood and asks me to come outside and play.
That’s one of the key tenets of Jackson County Library Services’ Embrace The Wild Summer Reading Program: seek out the wild, the unknown, the mysterious. Be curious. Learn. Explore.
My colleagues Ethan and Ellie – sidenote: are these good owl names? Leaning toward yes – both wrote about this, examining nature’s relationship to both creativity and being bold with interests you want to pursue.
But how far into the wild do we have to go to achieve these synergies? “Embrace The Wild” does seem to subtly imply there will be a journey involved, a trek to the unknown.
Sometimes that’s true, but I’ve observed that close to home — parks, backyards, community trails — has just as many vistas worthy of being immortalized by canvas or camera; the matter of deep core memories, right there. We must be intentional and curious enough to look, to see the cautious, inquisitive eyes in the trees.
Backyard Birds
In Amy Tan’s “The Backyard Bird Chronicles,” a book of essays, observations, and illustrations, Tan speaks of her own encounter with great horned owls.
This book has been on my to be read pile for a bit, but I picked it up immediately after my beloved feathered trilogy – or parliament, if you wish – appeared in the high branches of a tree that shades my house in summer and clogs my gutters with leaves in early autumn.
In the book, Tan says something extraordinarily simple, but something that really hit home.
“There are many things in my life that make me feel I am very, very lucky,” Tan says. “I can now add a pair of owls living in my yard as among them.”
If you’re interested in checking this book out (I can’t recommend it enough), or are curious about ones with a similar focus, we’ve compiled a list of such titles right here.
Immersing yourself in natural beauty to improve your mental health is not a new or particularly astounding concept, but I occasionally need to be reminded (read also: reassured) that the positive effects of trees, sunsets, owls, and the like still have power.
“There is mounting evidence, from dozens and dozens of researchers, that nature has benefits for both physical and psychological human well-being,” Ontario-based psychologist Lisa Nisbet, PhD, says in the American Psychological Association article ‘Nurtured by Nature.’ “You can boost your mood just by walking in nature, even in urban nature. And the sense of connection you have with the natural world seems to contribute to happiness even when you’re not physically immersed in nature.”
Sometimes that world of blues and greens and the critters residing there feels powerful enough to call to us. I’m not talking about “The mountains are calling and I must go” urges. More like: “Something colorful and big just landed on my wife’s peonies out back while I was doing dishes…and I must go.”
Have you ever been inside and seen or heard a slice of nature outside that is arresting to the point of needing to investigate? For me, such occurrences have included monarch butterflies, a sullen possum crawling along our fence line, a solar eclipse my wife and I forgot about until 9 a.m. felt more like 8 p.m., and, of course, owls. Not just these latest three, either. The calls of two dawn raptors perched in another tree in our yard a few months ago summoned me outside before I went to work.
“Oh my gosh, there’s two of them,” I said in a video I took on my phone.
I stared and spoke a mishmash of fawning claptrap they didn’t understand a word of until one of them flew right over me. Here’s a still frame from that video, one of my dawn buddies bidding me adieu as it tore past in a gasp of stealth and muted wings.
Look up, look out
These natural occurrences that draw us to the window and eventually outside, be they butterflies or giant awe-inspiring birds or distant stammers of thunder, demand our attention. They’re reminders that no matter how much brick, 2x4s, asphalt, and vehicles we’re surrounded by, that natural beauty will cut through the noise and fleeting dull colors. It will demand our attention. And sometimes, it will return it with a trio of knowing, big-eyed stares.
Someday, the parliament next door won’t be there anymore. But their multi-day visit has already obtained mythical status. It’s the type of story I’ll tell over and over again, a tale of me finding natural beauty in unexpected places; unassuming locales that I’ve seen but haven’t seen, if that makes sense.
“If there is anything I have learned these past six years, it is this,” Tan says in “The Backyard Bird Chronicles” “Each bird is surprising and thrilling in its own way. But the most special is the bird that pauses when it is eating, looks and acknowledges that I am there, then goes back to what it was doing.”