Yesterday the baby wrens in the nest in our night-blooming cereus
fledged. There may be another baby still nearby because one of the adults was
standing guard in the front yard, chirping encouragement. The feather coloring
on the fledglings was so vibrant. We had two families of birds in the front
yard this summer; the other nest was built and tended by blue jays. While those
babies were fledging, the adults pecked Jim on the head whenever he came out or
in by way of the front door. And I think there was a screech owl in the
backyard before daybreak yesterday. I find
that unsettling.
Truly, I am not a superstitious person, but we have screech owl
history at this house; in the southern US, there is a superstition that
the call of a screech owl foretells a coming death. Late in the summer of 2003, we began
hearing the call of an eastern screech owl (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6N4C4U70Ajc)
in the pre-dawn hours. I was up and about early Saturday morning of that Labor
Day weekend when one of my son’s cats, Marley, began yowling loudly and fell
over. I awakened my husband and we rushed him to the emergency veterinary
hospital where we were advised that he had had a heart attack and had no chance
of recovery. We had adopted him, as a kitten, from the Houston SPCA exactly
three years before, so he was still a young cat; but, apparently, it is a
common occurrence for American short hair male cats to have heart attacks
around three years of age. We had him euthanized and went home to grieve.
The
next morning, I again was awake in the predawn hours when I heard a loud
screeching begin at the far end of our street, traveling down the length of the street, and stopping in my front yard. That
evening as dusk fell, my husband went out into the front yard. He heard a quiet
hooting trill; looking up into the large ash tree to the right of our front door,
he saw a small screech owl which bobbed its head at him, swooped over to the tree
on the other side of the walkway and then flew away.
We didn’t hear or see a
screech owl again until November 20th, Thanksgiving Day. A group of
family and friends were sitting on the patio drinking beer and wine, thankful
for time spent with each other, when someone happened to notice a small screech owl
sitting in hole in the siding of my garage. My son, who had been away at
college in Ohio when Marley died and his father had had his moment with the
owl, bobbed his head at that owl who bobbed his head back and gently hooted
then flew away. My son came home the following spring, spent the summer digitizing
well logs for his dad, and on the day he
left to return to Wittenberg for his senior year of college, four screech owls
were gathered in the trees outside our front door.
I am thinking that a screech owl just might be my patronus.
