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I mentioned great horned owls earlier, and I want to add a few details to that. The call of these birds fits their name and general reputation: it is loud, deep, commanding and unmistakable. Once heard, it’s not easily forgotten. I will not demean the creature by attempting to render that call into Roman letters; it is a vain practice, since it gives not a hint of the actual sound, which I contend can only be fully appreciated on location, during a quiet night, at about 3:00 a.m. Until the snow began to fall, and the owls migrated south, I heard those calls on at least half of the nights when I was awake after dark. “After dark” sounds vague, but the owls covered a very large area, and there was no way of predicting what time of the night, if at all, they would turn up within range of my muffled hearing. If the hunting was exceptionally good somewhere else, they might not show up at all, and I wouldn’t hear them until a later night. But there was no doubting when they arrived. On a still night, hours after sunset, when man-made sounds are at their minimum, the call of a great horned owl can be heard for at least half a mile, well beyond that on the right wind. The call is strictly territorial, though temporary at that time of year (in the sense of being for that night only, in that season; the owl is simply looking for a meal, not seeking to attract a mate), and is clearly directed at other owls. Its prime purpose gives it its greatest interest—it is essentially a challenge, which is meant to evoke a response. I don’t know its intended effect upon the prey, but given the amount of time the owls spend settling their territorial disputes, there is nothing to prevent every local rodent from zipping back into its burrow the moment they hear the first ominous notes. It still amazes me that there is anything left to eat when the negotiations are over. On many occasions, the first owl to arrive near me called many times, yet received no response, and thus had the whole woods to himself. And when I say “near me,” this is no exaggeration; more than once the first call of the night scared the hell out of me by coming from directly overhead —the big hunter was sitting high in a tree that stood only yards from my tent. It is at moments like this when humility mixes with amazement, and you realize that no human throat could ever duplicate that sound, either in timbre, volume or theatrical effect. On some nights, the first owl to call got an answer from another one in a patch of woods across the fields, or north of the highway. This he did not seem to regard as a counter-challenge, but simply called a few more times before going about his business. This consisted of flying from perch to perch in the general area, issuing his call from each one before flying off to another. Whenever there was a long pause between calls, I always took it to mean he had taken a prey and spent a while devouring it. Once I had learned the “basic structure” of the call, I could recognize a peculiarity in any given rendition, and thereby track a single owl as long as he stayed within the range of my hearing. I’m not suggesting that I could identify the same individual owls night after night, merely on the basis of their calls. But I strongly suspect that a voice-print analyzer, or a very dedicated birder with superb hearing, of the kind that the late Roger Tory Peterson is said to have possessed, could do just that, since I never heard two owls that sounded exactly alike on any night while I was there. It was always possible to distinguish each of the birds from the others, merely from the way they delivered their calls. Each was unique in its inflection, timbre and pattern, despite their tendency to vary their delivery ever so slightly each time they called. This was the first time my Navy training in reading Morse code has found a use in 40 years—it conditions one’s auditory system to recognize and recall—to read—the time intervals between intermittent tones. The most fascinating moment in all this listening happened late one night when I had finished reading, turned off the flashlight and was simply lying in the darkness, letting the sounds of my little wilderness (plus my “medication”) lull me to sleep. Two owls had arrived some time earlier, but they seemed to be at opposite ends of the woods, while my tent then was more or less in the middle. Each of the birds called, and each responded, but the tone of their voices seemed perfunctory, with no real aggression behind it. Then a third owl arrived, and the atmosphere immediately changed. |
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