The Owl and Any Port in a Storm
It’s a messy, tedious Saturday afternoon here on Cape Cod... Very rainy, windy with gale-force gusts up to 60 mph. The wife got up early (for a Saturday morning), and ran her errands – made a dump run, got the car inspected and had its oil changed, went to the store, etc. I busied myself with my computer duties accompanied only by the wind. When the wife got back, we unloaded the car, put away the groceries... Awww, you know the drill. (We’ve all slogged through it hundreds of times. It’s the grit that slowly grinds the very life out of our souls.)
Anyway, I was in the kitchen, looking out the window at the feeders, and the wife drooped in and told me that she was going to take a nap. No sooner had she spoken those words when she suddenly turned into an 18 year old. She was racing around the house imploring, “Where’s the camera? Where’s the camera?” From the way she was behaving, I could tell that she had spotted something extremely unusual in the backyard, (like “Sasquatch” riding “Babe the Blue Ox” right outside the window). In fact, she saw yet another owl huddled in our “squirrel box” (a simple shelter we made for the larger critters that visit the feeders). It looks like this is an Eastern Screech owl with a reddish face. At the bottom of this post is a picture of this new visitor.
Last winter we had a similar owl with a gray face do the exact same thing during a severe snow storm.
It’s been almost two hours now, and the wife still sits out in the garage, with the camera on a tripod. Suz is wide awake, happy, content...
There is more than one way to seek shelter from the storm.
See you by the feeder,
Alan
