7:36 a.m. 27 degrees, wind NW 1 mph. Sky: baby blue, hosts thin, white clouds and a post sunrise hint of peach in the east. Permanent streams: oblong island of grit submerged until the next drought, growing. Like a trumpet mute, ice formations add sound effects to flowing water. Wetlands: frosted and silent, a three-dimensional museum diorama, working title, Mid-December, Vermont Marsh: Everything Quarantining. Pond: shoreline ice firm enough to support a coyote, muddied tracks in the southern cove, twenty prints around the delta, slowly closing over . . . piecemeal freezing.
Red crossbills on the hillside pines, a rain of chatter. Chickadees and jays and both species of nuthatches, a dependable quartet. No crows. No ravens. Six turkeys under the feeder.
Last night, shortly after sunset and before the crescent moon rose, an owl dismantled the silence, an echoing holler out of the void . . . a tuning fork in the brittle air—cold, crisp, unforgiving. I faced the sound, hands cupped to my ears and listened. Who else listened? The soft, bug-eyed flying squirrel gliding through the gloaming. Or a white-footed mouse gathering spilled seeds under the feeders? For squirrel or mouse, the barred owl reaps grimly. Soft feathers, a hushed nightmare glide, silent as smoke. All talons and beak. Seeks incautious rodents.
I imagine a flying squirrel's blood chills when it hears an owl's pronouncements—dog-like barking rising out of dark woods. Owl measures movements, every glide purposeful. And for the squirrel or the mouse, like the season itself, the night does not forgive. Last night, a hungry owl, a relentless ball of soft feathers, penetrated the dark with huge, round eyes and inner, asymmetric ears that twitched like radar, a one creature triangulation unit. For the owl, every night is another challenge: survival, no guarantees.
Barred owl: round-headed and slightly larger than a crow. Back gray-brown. White horizontal bars on the breast. Vertical streaks on the belly. A swivel head. Ears track sound. Eyes gather light. When the owl hears a mouse equally loud in both ears, he faces the source. Sees remarkable detail . . . round, dark eyes devour night, even those of the darkest pitch . . . a black and white mouse in a black and white landscape.
Last night, when the owl left his perch, he floated across the marsh, a dark bird over a dark landscape, a shadow beneath a diamond sky. Once owl business completed, the night drew quiet again. Then, hooting resumed from a far-off corner of the valley, staccato barks . . . seven or eight hollow notes rising at the end. He moved to the hill beyond the wetlands, along the eastern apron of the valley, in the pines above the marsh, where weasels hunt the brush piles. An unwary hunter may become the hunted.
Before I went to bed, I opened the window. An owl called, again. Captain of the gloom. A feathered-wraith that animated night and awakened silence. I cannot imagine Coyote Hollow without an owl. One March, a saw-whet lingered for days. Twice a long-eared, both deep-winter one-night stands. Always a barred. December shadows breathe when the fugitive predator trolls for dinner.
Here, on Brain Pickings, Maria Popova writes about Mary Oliver's magical collection "Owls and Other Fantasies: Poems and Essays".
https://www.brainpickings.org/2020/09/08/mary-oliver-owls/
And Oliver's poem, "The Owl Who Comes", is saved in my poetry folder:
The owl who comes
through the dark
to sit
in the black boughs of the apple tree
and stare down
the hook of his beak,
dead silent,
and his eyes,
like two moons
in the distance,
soft and shining
under their heavy lashes-
like the most beautiful life-
is thinking
of nothing
as he watches
and waits to see
what might appear,
briskly,
out of the seamless,
deep winter-
out of the teeming
world below-
and if I wish the owl luck,
and I do,
what am I wishing for that other
soft life,
climbing through the snow?
What we must do,
I suppose
is to hope the world
keeps its balance:
what we are to do, however,
with our hearts
waiting and watching-truly
I do not know.
Of course, I love the whole of it every day. But. There are certain phrases in your writing that just make my heart sing!