'Agree With Everything - Deny Nothing - Embellish All

Tuesday, August 30, 2005

The Owls Are Not What They Seem

The family of tyto alba refered to in an earlier post make their nest fifteen feet up in the hollowed-out bole of a tree just across from my bedroom window. Besides allowing wonderful owl-watching opportunities this also means that my slumbers are serenaded by the birds' crepuscular shriekings. At first this was slightly disturbing - 'eldritch' is the obvious, if unsettling, choice of adjective. But this nightly chorus of long, low, rasping, drawn out screeching has become a kind of serenade, enlivened by the occasional sight of a white wing flashing through the greenery above the wall. Two nights ago, in the middle of our August gales, I was lullabied by the insistent counterpoint of the south-west winds moving through the trees of the garden in the evening, their threshings hitting the beat of the owls' shrieks just often enough to lull me into a profound and restful sleep . . .

2 Comments:

Blogger Nick said...

Sad but true. Nothing else quite gave the sense of the disarming otherness you get from those sounds.

2/9/05 2:52 pm  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Loons fly over our house each day at approximatelyy 7:30 a.m. and then again in the evening around 8 or so right now. Soon, they'll be off south and we'll miss them in the closed-up winter house. Loons, like owls, really sound like nothing else.

3/9/05 12:19 am  

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