Field Notes—

The Invisible Owners Of The Night

By Curtiss Clark

Familiarity rocks the cradle of our sleep. It is why we find it so easy to get a good night’s sleep wrapped in familiar sounds: a distant refrigerator’s hum, the idle squeak of a shutter in the wind, even the quiet murmuring of a dreaming spouse. It’s the odd, out of place sound that wakes us. So when our furnace added an unfamiliar rattle to the monotony of its predawn complaining against the cold last week, I awoke.

Having come to wakefulness reluctantly, I was hoping the situation didn’t require extreme action, like crawling out from under the covers to go investigate. So I diagnosed the problem from afar (correctly as it turned out): sheet metal vibrating near the blower motor. But as I was straining to listen, the thermostat, warmed to its satisfaction, shut off the burner and blower, and the house was left in absolute stillness. Not a sound. No electronic hum, no wind whistling in the window left ajar, no distant traffic, no dream-state commentary from Kate. Just silence… and then, hoo HOO hoo hoo…

We have never seen the great horned owls that inhabit our neighborhood. We have only heard their haunting interrogatories in the night. We know there is a pair of them because we have heard them calling to one another — and to us. One night we went out with flashlights to try to track them down, and they had a great time leading us on into the darkness, taunting us always from just beyond the arc of our searching lights with “WHO… do you think you are.”

When it comes to hunting in the night, there are no creatures in the same league as owls. They are designed for darkness. They own the night. They see better in the dark than any other animal, and the great horned owl — the most common owl in the New World — has the largest eyes of the species and is believed to have the keenest eyesight. The large eyes are fixed in a straight-ahead stare and do not move within the eye sockets. To shift its gaze, the owl must move its whole head. And while the head doesn’t swivel all the way around, it does rotate more than 180 degrees in each direction. They are the only birds that blink with their upper eyelids, as we do. But when they sleep, their lower lids rise to close the eye like every other bird.

Owls hear with nearly the same acuity as they see. Their ear holes are located within the eye rings on their flat faces, which are shaped to direct sound waves toward the ears. Additionally, the great horned owl’s right ear is about an inch higher that its left ear, enhancing its ability to locate the source of a sound. Consequently, they can hear with great precision a twig rustle from 75 feet away, which bad news for naïve humans creeping though the night hoping to catch a glimpse of a great horned owl and also for rodents on the forest floor hoping to see another sunrise.

For the owl’s prey, death usually comes as a complete surprise. Unlike other birds, which have rigid flight feathers that whoosh as they fly, the owls wings and tails have soft muffling feathers along the edges, giving them the deadly nocturnal advantage of silent flight.

The area of their wings is oversized in relation to their weight, giving them tremendous power and lift. Consequently, the great horned owl’s prey isn’t always the unfortunate mouse or vole rooting around in the leaf litter. The birds typically weigh between 2 and 5½ pounds (the females weigh more than the males), but they will routinely prey upon much heavier species, including squirrels, rabbits, raccoons, and even skunks. They are fierce protectors of their nests, and will attack humans that get too close.

At night, all other living things must relate to owls strictly on their terms. But if you are lucky, sometimes, at dawn, or dusk, or during the day when they are unexpectedly flushed from their roosts, you can spot them, flying low with powerful thrusts of those inaudible wings, and you will see that the only part of their being not specifically designed for darkness is their incredible beauty.

To hide such a sight beneath the cloak of invisibility — WHO… do they think they are?