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7 | (continued) The newcomer took a perch much nearer me, and uttered a strident, no-nonsense challenge that brought me fully awake, anxious to hear what the other two would make of that. The bird to the south either held his peace or flew off, but the one to the north foolishly tried to assert himself in the face of this brash, and, I assumed, much younger owl. Rendered as a dialogue, it went something like this: Owl 1: “I’M HERE!” I’ve forgotten the number of repetitions, but such was the tenor of the exchange. You may think I’m anthropomorphizing these birds inexcusably, but let me assure you that what I heard that night was an example of blatant aural intimidation, achieved entirely through the reiteration, and most skillfully, the timing, of instinctive calls. Not being a birder myself, I can’t say at all how common this sort of thing is; much would depend upon the unique personalities of the resident owls. To judge by their vocal behavior, I can confirm that great horned owls differ from each other as much as do the members of any other intelligent, opportunistic species. The difference between the voices quoted above was by far the greatest that I heard all summer; the strong one was clearly in his prime, whereas the weak one was virtually whining, pitiable, hopelessly uncertain of himself from the beginning.
Entirely different were the birds that woke me in the morning. By far the most beautiful among those voices was that of the wood thrush, which approaches human music more closely than that of any other bird in my experience. It sounds miraculous to those who hear it for the first time—a series of tones and overtones seemingly complex beyond all necessity. I found myself hungering for its sound, which I never heard often enough. Some of this feeling was born of simple loneliness, to be sure, but part was due to the extreme rarity of such birds wherever I’d lived before. Thrushes are seldom seen even in the most heavily treed areas of Toronto; only in recent years have crows and mourning doves been evident in the city. Today, as I write this back in Toronto, I saw a red-tailed hawk swoop into a tiny city park, scatter the terrified pigeons and sparrows, do a 360° turn in the tight space and proceed to fly headlong into the window of one of the nearby buildings. He quickly recovered, sat on a tree branch, then on a light pole, took no prey and finally left. He seemed as uncomfortable in a city as I felt the first night I camped in a forest. Less exciting, but more familiar, were the blue jays, crows, ring-billed gulls, red-tailed hawks and yes, friends, the White Leghorn rooster kept by Boss’s neighbor Dan, whose hutch, I’m sure, was more than a third of a mile from my tent—which didn’t prevent its clarion call from being clearly audible every morning. Farm country. The thrushes and other songbirds always seemed very far above the tent, in the upper reaches of the oldest maples —trees that were probably healthy saplings when the railroad first came through in 1884. But I could often hear the gulls and geese out in the fields before freeze-up; these species never normally enter forests—certainly they didn’t visit mine. Being unable to take to the trees for protection from mammalian predators, and being understandably wary of them, they require a full view of their surroundings at all times.
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