Barred Owl

The owl came so fast and so big my brain couldn’t put together a coherent thought about it until it was already well past me. But I did manage to follow the gray streak into the thicket of tangled beech and oak limbs and then, there it was, staring back at me with a look of indignation on its face.

My eyes were so bleary I could hardly focus on it. There was no way I could identify it at first, the only thing I could see were it’s huge eyes, and it’s massiveness. I tried to focus and see if there were ear tuffs, but there were not. The only thing I could think of that was anywhere near a great horned owl’s size and lived in this area was a Barred Owl.

It was huge and gray, grayer than a Barred Owl should be, but then it was early morning, the light was bad and my eyes bleary.

I’d only been awake about 4 minutes. I hadn’t had so much as a sip of coffee and wasn’t actually birding even, I was driving to do some birding when the birds started for me. I watched the owl for about five minutes, it watched me for the same. I’ve never had a bird return my gaze with so knowing a stare. It wasn’t unpleasant, it felt curious in an offhand, vaguely irritated way. But it most definitely stared back the whole time.

After a while a truck pulling a fishing boat topped the hill and the owl dove off the branch, flapped it’s massive wings once and somehow glided expertly through the tangle of tree limbs until it disappeared deeper into the woods. I continued to watch the tree. I didn’t even acknowledge the truck as it went by — other people with the temerity to exist while I’m trying to stare down an owl don’t get acknowledged.

I climbed back in the car. As I drove off toward the meadow I was hoping would hold larks and prairie chickens and grouse, I started thinking about all the other owls that must have seen me over the past 18 months of living out in the woods, all the others that sat silent and watched me and I never knew it. Owls as largely invisible to us, writes ornithologist and writer Bernd Heinrich, talking about a barred owl he once studied. What Heinrich doesn’t address is that we’re not invisible to them. They’re out there, watching everything, and every now and then you get to watch them back.