Endangered Wisdom
As daylight breaks at the horizon, my nocturnal little friend is just retiring into the enclosed area in the top of my palm tree. As usual he has left little packages of indigestible bone and fur, wrapped up as if they were gifts from him to me, in the front yard around the base of the tree. Although it can be quite a nuisance, his endangered species status, makes these messes all that much easier to tolerate. I am proud to have a “special status” ranking animal residing in my tree, and I feel it is my duty to do what I can to protect him. I often sit on the front porch waiting for twilight, anticipating the moment when he will emerge from the tree to begin his night as the silent hunter. Except for an occasional tree limb falling or the dropping of the nest to make a new one, I never see my barn owl by daylight. I often wonder what he does all day tucked away in my palm tree. Every night about one hour after sunset, he comes out, flies over to the nearest phone pole and posts up there as if on guard duty for my yard. Sometimes he sits there for five minutes and some nights he stays for an hour. Irregardless of how long he sits, his behaviors are always the same. He sets himself atop the pole and begins what seems to be a scanning of the fields and homes around him. The eyes of owls are fixed in their position and cannot move from side to side.