As the title implies, this article is about an owl perched on a wire. If you conclude that this has the makings of a really, really boring piece then I commend the deductive and intuitive scope of your mind and invite you to move on to Don Freiday’s column or check out the recent bird sightings.
I see. You are a person whose unbridled faith trumps good sense. For your penance, keep reading.
Anyway, like I said, this article is about an owl that was perched on a wire. The wire was one of those narrow gauge, everyday types you see strung between telephone poles. The owl was one of the more common species. It was a Great Horned Owl.
This Great Horned Owl shows off its large talons while perched atop a stump. Photo by Scott Ellowitz.
“Why,” you must be asking yourself, “is this such a big deal? Birds perch on wires all the time.”
You’re right. Birds perch on wires all the time. Passerines, or “perching birds”, for the most part (although I have seen things like cormorants and shorebirds and some diurnal raptors sitting astride wires, too). But a Great Horned Owl is a really big owl. Milk jug sized. And it’s got really big feet. Big enough to wrap around a skunk and have talon to spare.
Great Horned Owls commonly show a distinct preference for sturdy perches. They sit on stumps, limbs, buildings, fence posts, duck blinds, muskrat houses, and skunks. Never, until just last night, had I ever seen one perched on so spindly a perch as a utility line.
I was so taken aback that I turned around. Drove back. Pulled up under the bird. Who (needless to say) calmly looked down at me while I was looking up at it.
Thought the owl: “Even with both feet, he’s too big to pry out of that can so I’ve got no use for this gawking idiot.”
Thought I: “What is a big bird like you doing sitting on a spindly little wire like that?”
The answer was the bird didn’t know it was too big to sit on such a spindly perch. The owl was a young bird. Recently fledged. Like all young things, it was just trying the world out. Seeing what worked and didn’t work.
And what it discovered was that milk jug-sized owls can perch on wires.
An adult Great Horned Owl keeps close to its young. Photo by Julian Hough.
If it’s not windy.
I discovered the same thing. And if you have ever wondered what it is that keeps birders birding after twenty, thirty, or in my case fifty years, the answer is:
“Possibility.” Combine possibility with happenstance and you have “Discovery” (which might be the aspire-to prize in the whole universe).
Now here’s the best part. I wasn’t on the prowl for adventure when I saw the owl. I didn’t get up out of my overstuffed chair; turn off the tube, and say: “I think I’ll go outside and discover something.”
No. I was on my way home from taking a walk and ran smack into something neat; something new; something that impressed upon me once again that we humans swim in a sea of possibility.
It can be waiting around the next corner. It can fall out of the sky. It is, more than any other thing, the reason we crawl out of bed in the morning and keep putting one foot in front of the other.
And you thought that this article was just going to be about a bird sitting on a wire. Ha. It’s about:
Life!
As subjects go, they don’t get much bigger than this.
I wonder what Don is writing about. I wonder what birds are being seen in Cape May.