Owls Nesting
On one of the very nights that Wendy and I were probing the dark in search of spotted salamanders, a streetlight went on in her downtown Boone neighborhood. Its bulb had been broken for years, creating a snaggletooth gap in the bright smile of lights that curve around her block. In a lot of places, a dormant streetlight’s activation would be seen as cause for celebration. But in her neighborhood it was viewed as a life-or-death concern demanding immediate attention.
Her neighbor a few doors down, Richard Gray, professional astronomer, was the first to notice the change. This seems fitting, since an astronomer’s job is, at root, to study light. Astronomers take images of nebulae, swirls of dark and bright, and interpret what’s happening in the interplay. As a researcher, Richard uses spectroscopes to break stellar light into component colors the way prisms reveal rainbows, with hues suggesting a star’s age and velocity.
Years ago, he had to travel winding mountain roads to access the telescopes at Appalachian State University’s Dark Sky Observatory, located several miles past my own neighborhood, which is on the outskirts of Boone. Now he just logs on to apps from his computer, which gives him the power to remotely access telescopes from his house. The whole endeavor could be handled at a distance via screens and buttons, but he still often steps into his yard beforehand to gauge local weather.
It was during one of these regular surveys that he noticed a streetlight-maintenance truck. In recent years, the Town of Boone has phased out traditional lights for more energy-efficient bulbs. County workers weren’t aware that this streetlight had been nonfunctional for years; they were just going about their assignment.
The additional artificial light would have, under any circumstances, been worrisome for a man who spends his life attempting to decipher starlight. But Richard was doubly worried, because the light emitted wasn’t only interrupting his stargazing—it was reaching into a wooded lot across the street, all the way to his newly installed owl-nesting box.
For the last few years, Richard and his wife had enjoyed a screech owl singing them to sleep, and he had just built a nesting box in appreciation. As a lifelong birder, he knew that screech owls don’t craft nests of twigs and twine. They’re cavity nesters who tend to find already established holes in trees. So in most places where mature trees have fallen to development, owl boxes can be helpful.
After Richard put the box up, he’d waited for owls to take him up on the offer of shelter. And he’d waited—and waited. Then, just before that streetlight went back on, a screech owl pair had shown up. It’s common practice for owls to house hunt before settling down, so the light had particularly bad timing. The relationship he’d worked to establish was acutely threatened.
The new bulb was, like almost all newly installed bulbs, a white-light-emitting diode (LED). And, like many LED lights, it produced blue-rich white light. This type of light isn’t just the most damaging for astronomers’ sight; it’s one of the most biologically confusing for wildlife, since animals read blue light as a signal to enact daytime behaviors.
Astronomers tend to think of light not in generalities, but by wavelength: Red waves are long and easygoing, blue are short and energetic. We might dismiss sunlight as a generic white, but it’s violet and blue and green and yellow and orange and red. We’re surrounded by rainbows every day, we just can’t always make out light’s diversity—mainly because blue wavelengths are particularly pushy. Given their density and size, they tend to scatter more easily than others, which is why we see sunny-day skies as blue.
When animals are blasted with blue light at night, their bodies naturally read it as daylight. This is why, with an increase in light pollution, biological systems three billion years in the making are starting to misalign. Animals get amped for their respective activities out of sync. Artificial light literally puts us on different wavelengths.
In contrast, warm-tone spectra tend to be read by animal bodies for what they are: more easygoing energy. Campfires and old-fashioned incandescent bulbs tend to pool light where they’re located. But blue wavelengths behave like beads hitting hardwood floors. Even in situations where streetlights point downward, as responsible guides suggest, blue light tends to bounce skyward.
Advanced LED bulbs provide more light with less energy. This has led to near-universal adoption of blue-rich LEDs, though the technology is capable of other colors. Life scientists generally agree that LEDs with high blue content have larger biological impact than the bulbs that came before them. And the potential energy conservation of using this technology has largely been negated by human behavior. Instead of using less energy after switching to LED lights, people have, the world over, started using even more energy for ever-brighter illumination, as if we’ve collectively decided that, since the light is energy-efficient, we might as well produce more of it.
Milan, Italy, was one of the first European cities to convert to white LEDs. By 2019, more than half of the city’s streetlights had been switched from warm-tone bulbs. The trend is observable around much of Europe, and North America’s light pollution is increasing at an even faster rate. In 2023, the U.S. Department of Energy instituted regulations to halt production of the 30 percent of incandescent and halogen bulbs still being offered, limiting warm-color options. They reported that the switch would reduce carbon emissions by 222 million metric tons over 30 years, the equivalent of the emissions generated by 28 million homes annually.
They stated that this could save the average American family $100 a year, but there are no clear estimates on the biological costs of increased blue light—not to humans, not to owls, not to any living being on this photosensitive planet. In fact, there is a dearth of data on the toll it has already taken or even how much artificial light we’re engulfed in after sunset.
Many news stories about light pollution present it as having increased roughly 50 percent over the past 25 years. But people familiar with satellite technology have brought to attention the fact that some of the equipment that’s been used to gather data is not sensitive to blue wavelengths, which are on their way to global domination. With blue-rich LEDs taken into consideration, some scientists suggest that, in certain places, artificial light pollution has more realistically increased 270 to 400 percent during the past 25 years.
Interestingly, as outdoor blue light has proliferated, literally under radar, our awareness of it indoors has increased. During the pandemic, when nearly every interaction with people outside of a given household—be it personal, professional, or telehealth—was conducted via screens, the popularity of glasses with blue-blocking lenses grew. We know blue light is harmful, but it seems impossible to get away from it. After all, when Richard stepped away from his computer on that first LED-lit night, he found that the same blue spectra that he’d been trying to take a break from had swallowed his entire house from the outside.
He’d planned to watch the miracle of owls’ seldom-observed life cycles unfold with the same close attention that he gives young stars through telescopes at the observatory. Now, every tender act he’d hoped to witness was under siege—along with the well-being of every living creature on his street.
Frantic to find an off switch, he started making calls. To public officials. To neighbors who might help him create an uproar. But in the end, no uproar was needed. The town hadn’t known the owls were there. Once administrators learned that a brooding pair might be disturbed by the streetlight—which they’d thought, if anything, human residents would consider an upgrade—workers arrived within seventy-four hours to remove the bulb, returning the neighborhood to the level of darkness it had previously enjoyed.
Municipal administrators had been trying to do the right thing with those LEDs. They had crunched facts and figures, but they had not absorbed the true cost of pelting ice-hard energy against every spring-soft creature in its radius. Unfortunately, the town’s quick response was still too late. By the time the streetlight went dark, those house-hunting owls had already fled.
No one can say for sure that artificial light was the only reason the owls left. But what the Cooper family can confirm is that—a few doors down from Richard’s house—the same LED light that hit his owl box flooded their living room. It pushed through curtain cracks to cover their children’s beds. Immediately, they decided to invest in blackout blinds to guard against light. Otherwise, the carefully scheduled equilibrium of their household—with two energetic kids and a rambunctious dog—was going to be thrown off.
Outdoors, the wall of their wood-sided house, maybe 200 feet from Richard’s owl-nesting box, acted as a dam that stopped the highest tides of LED-light from reaching the forested lot on the other side of it, as well as a small space between their house and the one behind it. It was in that surviving woodland, roughly three trees wide, that they found a blue-light refugee peeking out of a hole in their chestnut oak tree.
The hole was one they kept an eye on during nesting season because, for years, the oak had been home to a family of nuthatches. But hosting screech owls was a special privilege. Soon, neighbors were stopping by to get a peek, whispering about their observations at low volume, since owls are particularly sensitive to noise, as well as artificial lighting.
Sarah Cooper, an old childhood friend who’d heard about my nocturnal-creature communing, started texting me photos of the female bird, framed by the oak hole at sunset. Around the same time, another friend, who lives in the house behind Sarah’s, began sending images of the male, who’d started napping in a moss-coated tree beside her second-story balcony. Before long, my text message threads made it seem like I was part of a vast network of owl-tabloid reporters.
Ultimately, Sarah invited me over to see the owls in person. She explained that, during nesting season, a female screech owl waits in the tree all day. But when she senses that darkness is deep enough to ease her mobility, that mother bird launches into the wider world to take a break from acting as sentry, giving the owlets’ father a chance to tend to them. Sarah suggests that, though she has not seen any owlets, she’s sure they’ve already been born. Because, when the wind is just right, it sounds like the tree is singing.
It’s near dusk when I meet the screech owl. I am alone since the Coopers had to go out. But, as promised, they’ve left me a monocle scope. I find it sitting on their deck, already trained on the oak, its trunk barely a hundred feet from their back door. Without the already focused device, I doubt I would have been able to find the nest hole—or the small, feathered face filling it.
The owl’s feathers are indistinguishable from the bark of the tree she inhabits, a mottling of browns and whites with hints of copper. Her wide, mossy eyes match the green of early spring leaves. In the scope’s frame, the owl blinks. I blink. I am watching her. She is watching me.
In many cultures, looking into owl eyes is ill-advised. Owls are, around the world, sometimes seen as symbols of luck, but they’re just as often representative of witchery and death. Regardless of cultural connotations, a recurring storyline throughout human history has been that these birds are messengers with the ability to travel between earthly and otherworldly realms.
Even among seasoned bird-watchers, finding an owl nest is considered a holy grail. Owls, like many nocturnal animals, are under-studied, not in small part due to how hard it is for researchers to scour the wild after dark. Raptor centers repeatedly suggest that no one should reveal the location of an owl nest, lest the place be overrun by curious onlookers. I’m honored that this secret spot has been shared.
I can hear bits of conversation coming from a house through trees. Someone on a porch another road over sneezes. Cars are barreling by. On a mountain-cut roadside above me, a delivery truck hits a bump, metal doors rattling. Finally, things settle.
Coo-ah, a bird calls from somewhere nearby. Coo-coo-coo. Or is that who-who-who?
I straighten my spine. Close my eyes. Focus.
At first, I think this is the mate of the owl in the nest, the father who is somewhere close by, waiting for dusk. But I soon realize that I’m listening to a mourning dove. Its cooing sounds like the owls of cartoons, the who, who of children’s books, not the lilting call of the screech species. Frankly, the dove I’m hearing sounds more like a stereotypical owl than the actual owl recordings I’ve listened to in preparation.
When a motorcycle rumbles by, I see the noise register in the mother owl’s body as a slight neck twist. The human driver is wholly unaware that his machine is disturbing an unseen nest. Above, simultaneously, there is the rumble of a small aircraft, the sort that someone might hire for a mountain-view tour. But we are shrouded under shade trees.
The Coopers’ house is already in shadows due to the surrounding, layered mountains. The gradual rise of darkness carries with it a roiling owl song. It’s not screeching in the least. It’s more of a trembling pony whinny: Weheeheehee, weee.
The owl is letting his mate know that he’s nearby. It is a call that screech owls make to keep in touch with their families when they are apart: mother in nest, father somewhere around, tucked into the nook of a branch. Mated screech owls have been known to sing to each other day and night.
These owls’ musical thread, connecting them despite their distance, evokes time spent with my own elderly family members through glass during pandemic years. It makes me think of the doors set between my loved ones during quarantine. Porch visits with friends, metal rails that held people out and in. The close-yet-so-far trilling makes me think of how people banged pots and pans from high-rise windows in cities. How, while all those things were happening, people reported a heightened awareness of birds, noticed other species calling out their own songs of love and mating and warning. We were together. We were alone. We are still surrounded by nonhuman neighbors who chat and enact dramas of their own.
Gnats swarm the owl’s eyes. She blinks and blinks before retreating into the tree, leaving me to stare at a black hole. My eyes turn toward the ground, which undoubtedly houses salamanders. I have played with toddlers in this woodland myself. Those days—spent with my son and his friends, including Sarah’s kids—reminded me of how a wooded lot, or even a few trees, can seem like a vast wilderness to children.
When the owl returns, she seems to be taking a power nap before dad begins his shift. Light drains as she rests. I am here, her mate calls in quivers of assurance: I am here, I am here. He whinnies often so that she cannot forget.
I sit, without distraction, until the golden-sunset hour fades into gray. Until the entire scene has transformed to shades of tree bark. Coo, calls the mourning dove, reminding me that, in a very short span of time, I’ve begun to decipher languages that are not my own.
There is anticipation in the owl’s stance, a nearly imperceptible inching. I do not move my eye from the scope. I want to catch the decisive moment when darkness hits just the right tone, a signal that only the owl can interpret. Finally, the oak tree’s feather-camouflaged midsection swells like a tree burl, until, in a single swift motion, the owl flings herself into the sky, released by the blessed arrival of night.
When I return to the Coopers’ house a few evenings later, I find Pace Cooper, elementary science teacher and dad extraordinaire, having his short brown hair brushed by his youngest daughter. “I’m being preened,” he says, laughing before he pauses to explain to his daughter that preening is how birds groom, pulling dirt off feathers with their tiny beaks.
Sarah—a veterinarian by trade—is standing at the kitchen counter, washing dishes. I don’t see her often, but I’ve known her almost all my life. We went to summer camp together at a now-shuttered local establishment. We’re both in Boone because, independently, we decided that we wanted to live at camp forever. Once, we were kids bunking in cabins named after John Steinbeck novels. Now, we’re adults whose only evening plan is to observe owls.
When Sarah scoops up her daughter for nighttime routines, Pace and I step into the night. It’s already too dark to use the scope. All we have are naked eyes and open ears. And we feel like that’s okay. Owls aren’t meant to be seen by humans so much as heard, anyway.
On our way out the door, Pace hands me a blanket from a pile reserved for campfires. In these mountains, nesting season can be chilly. We settle into patio chairs, and he tells me about how he used to work at a local wildlife rehabilitation center that often took in injured screech owls, sometimes even saw-whet owls.
Saw-whets, known as one of the most charismatic owl species, first came to my attention—and that of millions of other people—in the depths of the pandemic, when a worker decorating the 2020 Rockefeller Center Christmas tree noticed golden eyes peering at him from the interior of an 11-ton Norway spruce that had been trucked in from upstate. The worker thought he’d found a baby, given that the adult bird was barely seven inches in length.
The owl, named Rocky, became an internet sensation. Picture books were written. Songs were sung. Headlines appeared in the New York Times and the Washington Post. NBC declared Rocky to be a “bright spot” in a terribly dark time. But it was from darkness he came, and to darkness he would go again—and that wasn’t a bad thing. Still, the media generally overlooked the fact that darkness is required for any owl to have a happy ending.
When Rocky was released into the wild, an Audubon Society owl expert suggested that, since the limbs of his former home had been covered in 700,000 LED lights, he would likely set out for Appalachia’s sky islands—high elevation, cold-weather habitats of spruce and fir that are remnants from the Pleistocene epoch. These high-peak habitats—left behind when most boreal forests shifted during historic climate change—are isolated from similar ecosystems by hundreds of lower-elevation miles.
Sky islands are naturally darker than the land around them, identifiable as ink blots on light pollution maps, given that their peaks are too craggy for easy development—though they still need protection. Climate change from human activity—which is occurring ten times faster than the average rate of warming that formed these remnant habitats after an ice age—is rapidly encroaching, with warm air currents degrading sky-island habitat the way rising oceans eat away coastlines. But for now, the cloud-towering sky islands remain somewhat intact, surviving against all odds, like Rocky.
When I tell Pace about how Rocky captured my imagination, he nods, as if becoming obsessed with tiny owls on remote sky islands is a normal preoccupation. Before he dedicated himself to teaching, he was a fly-fishing guide. But before that, he was a biology student studying owls. Saw-whets, specifically.
I’ve known Pace for years, but it is only now, within listening distance of an owl nest, that I learn his graduate-school work included fitting saw-whet owls with tracking devices in the 1990s. He tells me that one night, an owl he was tracking went dormant for so long on Grandfather Mountain that Pace became nervous. Ultimately, he found the animal shrouded inside a tree. Determined, Pace went to a nearby hardware store to buy a ladder, and, using an angled dental mirror, discovered that the bird wasn’t dead; she was nesting.
His discovery played a role in confirming that saw-whets are permanent Southern Appalachian residents, with some nesting-as-opposed-to-migratory populations surviving here, in remnant northern-species forests that remained when lowland evergreens were lost eons ago. Now, here we are, sitting on his patio, watching a screech owl with a saw-whet resemblance nesting with Pace’s own family, each species keeping their distance.
This owl, likely artificial-light refugee, went from an astronomer’s owl-box straight to the shadow of a house inhabited by two owl-loving life scientists. It is, like the story of Rocky, like something out of an avian fairy tale. “You know, I used to find saw-whets in Christmas tree farms all the time,” Pace says of his tracking days. The tiny owls often use the farms as way stations as they move from sky island to sky island, across Appalachia, the way monarch butterflies use milkweed plants to support their fantastic migrations, though pesticide use is a concern for all involved.
Our county is full of tree farms. I live, as the crow flies, less than a mile from one. It’s novel to think of them as way stations by which a saw-whet owl with evergreen needs might traverse the East Coast. But even during daylight, owls need darkness in the form of shade, just as trout depend on overhanging trees to cool mountain streams.
There very well might have been saw-whets visiting my own neighborhood while I was scrolling social media posts about Rocky. And there are surely screech owls nesting in woodlands near my house. I’d been thinking of sky islands as enchanted places at high elevation. But thanks to this tree-farm information, I’m now imagining the land between the Cooper house and mine as owl territory.
Above our heads, the mother screech owl is keeping watch, waiting for darkness to cue the father’s temporal caretaking duties while she perches nearby so that he can easily deliver food to her as well as the owlets. Above us, the male owl whinnies. “Haunting, right?” Pace says. “That’s why people use screech owl sounds in horror movies, to set up for dark situations. Their call is kind of terrifying.”
When light fades to a pale gloom that’s visible through the overstory, the mother bird leaves her post with the same triumphant leap as before. Around the same time, Sarah steps out to join us, her own children tucked into bed. She clicks a propane fireplace on to supplement the warmth of blankets. Then, almost immediately, she turns it off. It isn’t so much that she thinks firelight would bother the owls; it’s because the stove makes a hissing sound. “This is way too loud,” she says.
In the quiet that follows, she asks, “Hear that?” I close my eyes and hear the owlets chirp-chirping. When I open my eyes again, a songbird-size shadow smears the twilight above me.
“That’s the dad,” Pace says. “He just dropped off a snack.”
Again and again, the male makes his way over and under tree limbs. Weaving and bobbing. Feeding and hunting. In time, the flying gets wild, with the owl swooping lower. “One just flew three feet over your head,” Sarah says as we enjoy the aerial show. Owl parents move in and away, in and away. And, all the while, through the oak’s open-mouth hole, tiny voices keep tumbling out as baby birds practice their singing. “This is so cool,” Sarah says. “The babies are louder this week.”
“You know, our eyes would be the size of softballs if they were proportionally the same size as owls’ eyes,” Pace says. Sarah laughs. She has the most striking eyes of anyone I know, crystalline blue framed by black-gone-gray hair, though right now, it’s too dark to see any of this.
Owls’ famed night vision employs the same rod and cone systems as human eyes, though they have a greater ratio of rods to cones. Their eyes also dilate to extreme extents to let in available light. They’re more open to artificial light, so it stands to acutely harm them. At extreme levels, it can damage their retinas, going beyond hampering sight to permanently limiting vision.
The neighborhood is so quiet that I can hear the clicking of talons against the tree-hole rim when owls land. “It’s usually the dad that takes care of feeding, but both parents seem to be at it tonight. A hundred and fifty grams, that’s what a screech owl weighs,” Pace says, in teacher mode. “It’s like the equivalent of thirty nickels in your hand.”
Birders commonly compare animal weight to nickels, but this inspires Sarah to turn on a flashlight so that she might show me an actual coin, gold that’s been pressed to fit the curve of her finger. The ring, bearing the outline of an owl, had been an unexpected gift from her aunt long before these owls moved in. She’d worn it for months before she encountered a stranger—on an airplane, in flight, of all places—who had the same owl image tattooed on her arm.
“She told me that the owl is modeled after a famous ancient Greek coin,” Sarah recalls. And, with that information, a portal to understanding owls’ place in Western culture opened for her. The owl on the fifth-century coin Sarah wears is known as the Athenian owl. Sarah says, “Reproductions of the coins are more common than you might think.” There seems to be market demand for them, owl lovers aplenty.
Ever since I started thinking about saw-whets living in Appalachia’s sky islands, ever since I first locked eyes with this resident owl, I’ve been wondering: Why is it that we think of owls as smarter than the average bird? How did they come to be considered wise? In western culture, this traces to Athena, ancient goddess of wisdom and courage.
In Greek mythology, the owl rides through life on Athena’s shoulder. The bird, as a nocturnal creature with supreme night vision, allows Athena to view truths that she could not see on her own. In this sense, the Athenian owl is a counterpart to human knowledge, embodiment of what we struggle to access. It is, according to Greek mythology, through tiny owls that darkness communicates its teachings.
The city of Athens, Greece, is thought to have been named for Athena not necessarily because of the goddess’s supernatural prowess but because, in ancient times, tiny birds—a small species known as Athene noctua, resembling both saw-whets and screech owls—were present in overwhelming numbers. There is a still-used adage in Greece that speaks to this history. To needlessly give someone something that they already possess in spades is said to be like giving owls to Athenians. Even today—in a city once lit by torches that can now be seen as a blob of LED light from space—owls of Athene noctua lineage nest in the ruins of Athens’s ancient darkness.
On a street below the Cooper house, someone walks by whistling a tune. Then the neighborhood goes quiet. “Hear them getting stronger now?” Sarah says of the unseen owlets. “They’re up there just chit-chittering.” It is a high-pitched, melodic sound.
Their mother is still away. Their father is off in darkness unknown. We imagine that they are crying, calling out for food, wanting to absorb the heat of their mother’s body.
“Oh, Leigh Ann,” Sarah says in a soothing voice. “Stay calm. Don’t react.” Her eyes are trained on something just over my shoulder. “Turn around really, really slowly. There’s an owl right behind you. I mean, it’s really, really close.”
Anyone who has spent time around me knows that staying calm is not my strong suit. I am highly excitable, for better and worse. But it feels like the serene overtones of this natural night that’s absorbed us might help my body match the tranquility of the moment.
Slowly, slowly, I turn. And on a rhododendron branch, barely an arm’s length from my body, I see the dark outline of an owl. She is staring at me. I am staring at her.
I was at an advantage during our last meeting, in lingering daylight, but she’s at an advantage here, in the deeper end of evening. Her giant eyes are taking in more moonlight than mine. Despite the bird of prey’s proximity and razor talons, the encounter is not intimidating. It feels like a wild-world blessing. We have chosen darkness, and this owl has, in turn, chosen us. Across the dormant fireplace, Sarah swears that, from where she’s sitting, it looks like the tiny owl is perched directly on my shoulder.
Richard, the owl-loving astronomer, has a gray wizard’s beard. He greets me at his front door, where I notice that he has propped open the metal lid of his letter box with a clothespin. In its dark innards, a songbird has already woven a nest. Richard’s mail carrier has been directed to leave any human missives on the stoop to avoid disturbing it.
I’ve dropped by because I’m curious about how an astronomer, professional interpreter of light, thinks about darkness. Graciously entertaining the notion, Richard leads me to his backyard garden, where we sit in the shade of a ginkgo tree. There I ask, point-blank: “What is light, really?”
“Light is energy traveling at us,” he says. “That’s pretty easy to explain: particles of energy, photons, propelled through space.” Darkness, however, is a little more complicated. “Darkness is what you get in the absence of visible light,” he says.
“But wouldn’t that mean light is what you get in the absence of visible darkness?” I say, standing up for darkness, underdog of the ages.
Richard shakes his head. “Not exactly,” he says.
I tell him that at the camp Sarah and I attended as children, we were taken into caves with carbide lanterns. In the subterranean depths of these hills, counselors would, at some point in the journey, always instruct us to turn off our lanterns to be introduced to what they called “true darkness.” But, though it had appeared to be true darkness to me, I’d still been surrounded by light waves.
Richard explains that everything I’ve ever encountered has surrounded me with light, visible or at wavelengths beyond my capacity to see. Natural light is never absent, only present in states heightened or lessened. “Without temperatures of absolute zero, there can be no absolute darkness,” he tells me. Absolute zero—the calculation of lowest possible energy or thermal motion—is a temperature that isn’t present on Earth.
Everything above absolute zero, that is, everything on this planet, puts off heat energy. And everything that puts off heat emits light of some kind. It is just that, in some forms, it’s via wavelengths humans cannot see, because we do not have the sensitivity to do so, though other species, like pit vipers, have organs that allow them to read longer wavelengths. Night-vision goggles mimic this for humans, amplifying visible light, giving us a peek at how pit vipers might view things.
Richard points to a cinder block sitting near his porch, imbued with the heat of the day, as something emitting infrared light right beside me. Though we cannot see the waves it is emitting, if we touched it, we would still be able to sense infrared light as heat. “Even if the sun went out, there’d still be infrared radiation around,” he tells me.
The temperature of the universe at large is generally considered 2.7 kelvin. That is above absolute zero. This means that even what we view as the black part of the night sky is not an absence of energy. It is, arguably, a state of calm in an increasingly frenetic and artificially lit universe.
But what is darkness, really? And how have I spent nearly half a century not knowing? “If light is energy traveling at us and darkness is reduced energy, does that mean that darkness is a form of rest traveling at us?” I ask.
“I suppose you could think of it that way,” Richard says, smiling slightly at the notion of night as a care package delivered on the regular.
What we’re talking about evokes the tenets of animistic religions, nature-based traditions purporting that spirits reside in all that exists—in every stream, mountain, and tree. Once, in Japan, I visited a Shinto shrine where I was advised that there were spirits, kami, present in local geology. And now I know that all the while, mountain stones had been emitting unseen light all around me.
Light that we cannot see is emitted by everything that we can see. The good. The bad. The ugly. The things we consider inanimate. The things we think of as being dead. Energy is present even in the black space around stars, just as firefly larvae are present in my backyard, glowing brightly in the ground even during the coldest nights of winter. Even in what we call true darkness, the earthly places where our eyes find rest, light energy does not disappear. It simply hushes.
“We have the ability to see this tiny part of the electromagnetic spectrum,” he says. “Because that’s all we can see, we tend to think that’s all there is. But there’s so much more.”
Barely a week passes before I’m cradling the remnants of the screech owls’ nest in my hands. First, the neighborhood owl box was hit by artificial light. Now, in a twist that’s hard to believe, the owls’ tree has been hit by lightning.
The bolt came just as the last fledgling was strong enough to fly out on its own, so no owls were harmed. The Coopers were out of town when the surrounding hills echoed with the sound. The oak was split into two halves, near perfect in division. The hardwood nest was cracked like an egg.
I’ve been dispatched to inspect the damage. The owls’ home is a complete loss, but the human houses around it are intact. After reporting to anxious friends, I started picking through leaf litter to discover the bits and pieces of what was once the birds’ sole domain.
The nest’s interior is an exposed, previously dark place that I wish I’d never had the opportunity to peer into. But here it is. And here I am, attempting to decipher its contents like a fortune-teller. I find bits of owl pellets and hollow-quilled feathers embedded in wood grain.
In the shade of trees spared, I recall that Athena, goddess of owls, daughter of Zeus, was among the few Greek deities said to be able to cast lightning from her fingertips. Sarah, who wears an ancient-world Athenian owl ring, now has an owl nest smote by lightning lying inches away from her patio table. The chances are unfathomable. The splintered wood, difficult to bear.
In ancient times, lightning—like the appearance of an owl—was viewed as a message from another realm. Maybe it still should be. It’s estimated that lightning rates will increase 12 percent for every degree of rise in global temperature in the future. That means by the end of the century, Earth might have experienced a 50 percent increase in lightning strikes since 2014. This will bring wildfires, since the U.S. Forest Service reports that 45 percent of them are lightning-started. Forest fires can themselves create lightning when they get going, due to particulates of air pollution rubbing together, charged. The larger the blaze, the harder it becomes to extinguish. The more lights we turn on, the more there are to turn off. On and on.
Artificial light at night even impacts daytime air quality. In natural night, compounds called nitrate radicals scrub volatile organic compounds from the air before they have time to turn to smog. It’s a process that cannot occur during the day, since sunlight destroys required molecules—as does artificial light. Over Los Angeles, artificial light at night is now so bright that levels of the natural nocturnal cleanser have been reduced by up to 4 percent. Basically, under the influence of artificial light, atmospheric molecules are unable to clean the sky in preparation for the following day. They can no longer preen.
The atmosphere that has protected us by holding out the most harmful wavelengths of sunlight is now visible in night photography as holding in artificial light. From the right angle, light pollution can be seen as a hard-shell coating on what was once the periodically dark-facing side of our planet. From certain vantage points, Earth now looks like it’s being cooked from the inside out.
When I first heard the story of Rocky, the saw-whet owl who escaped the LED-lit Christmas tree to head to Appalachia, I was romanced by the notion of sky islands as remnant habitat from a long-ago climate shift. But in this world of increasing light, in this time of climate change, maybe all patches of darkness are remnant habitat, a term generally used to refer to wildlands that have not been severely degraded by human activity, even as the areas around them have deteriorated.
Undoubtedly, somewhere close to where I’m crouching, the screech owl family—which I watched grow over time—is now roosting in shade. Sadly, there is no way to quickly grow another oak tree with a nesting hole, gift of an aging tree. But, now that the streetlight has been removed by the town, the dark habitat they lost to light at the start of this season has been restored. There is solace in knowing that these owls might have a safe place to land next season—in relative darkness, with an owl box waiting. The residents of this neighborhood have considered both nesting locales and dark-sky habitat. And it’s likely that, next season, their efforts will be rewarded with serenading.
Around the world, people are working to bring attention to the importance of natural night. In 1988, a pair of concerned astronomers founded the International Dark-Sky Association—which was later renamed DarkSky International—to “preserve and protect the nighttime environment and our heritage of dark skies through quality outdoor lighting.” It was the first organization to mark the dark-sky movement, which is a global campaign to reduce light pollution.
One of the organization’s best-known programs is accrediting International Dark Sky Places, an initiative founded in 2001, to encourage communities to preserve darkness via responsible lighting and public outreach. Through the program, towns and cities can become “International Dark Sky Communities,” and there are other labels for wilderness areas. This language evokes the National Park system, with places set aside for darkness to reside. But, not unlike the saw-whet owls who use tree farms to hop from habitat to habitat, dark-dependent creatures need connected corridors to migrate, just as they need pools of darkness in which to nest.
In Europe, there’s a growing movement calling for “dark infrastructure.” Advocates suggest that, in the way green infrastructure focuses on land conservation and blue infrastructure on the health of waterways, dark infrastructure should focus on nocturnal habitat. This includes finding ways to map light pollution and preserving and restoring darkness with an attitude of temperance that some have started referring to as “lighting sobriety.”
Birds of various species have been found to nest up to a month earlier in areas of light pollution than those living in places of relative darkness. This can be disastrous for some, since the insects they depend on for food are not available, leading to starvation. For other species, it is a benefit, because the insects they depend on are also aligning with faux daylight rather than the cues of darkness. We’re all increasingly following the directives of artificial light rather than the messages of the universe. Because often, in the human-generated din, we can no longer clearly perceive them.
Dark space is important not only as reservoirs safeguarding nests but as passages of safe travel. Winged creatures need dark skies the same as migrating paws and hoofs need unfenced terrain to tread. We might think of songbirds as daytime companions as opposed to night owls, but 80 percent of North America’s migratory birds travel at night, using stars as navigational devices while avoiding the turbulence of daytime thermals. In U.S. cities alone, 365 to 988 million birds are killed every year during these nocturnal migrations in part due to artificial lighting issues, which disorient and cause them to collide with buildings, often fatally. And without access to navigational stars in cities awash with LEDs, some birds simply lose their way, with city lights drawing them away from their ancestral migratory flyways.
Ornithologists employ various methods to track bird migrations, including tagging birds, using geolocators, and satellite tracking. One way to detect birds’ presence is by weather radar, which can help scientists identify peak activity so that they might warn municipalities to turn off lights on particularly active nights. In this way, via computers, scientists probe bird behavior by studying the presence of animals as data translated into light. But not always.
Even now, in the satellite age, ornithologists still employ old-school fieldwork that shuns artificial light for methods that immerse them in night. Via a practice called moonwatching, they sometimes fix scopes on the surface of a full moon. Through the scopes, birds can be seen as passing shadows.
This practice was popularized in the late 1800s after an ornithologist happened to be given a tour of a university astronomy department during an active migration night. When he was offered a close-up view of the moon, he was shocked to see migratory birds slipping across its face. Inspired, he started figuring out ways to estimate flying altitude, using moonlight to help him solve earth-based mysteries. The number of birds observed in a moonwatching session gives an idea of larger migration activity.
Around the time that moonwatching gained popularity, in the 1940s, nocturnal flight calls were recognized in migration monitoring. Contemporary moonwatching ornithologists often carry field microphones in buckets that act as amplifiers so they might discern which species are flying above. By catching songs in quart containers, the way that, as a child, I tried to capture slippery minnows, birders can discern the specifics of what they’re witnessing.
Before I spent time with owls, I had no idea that there are millions of animals, rivers of life, rushing through darkness, clear across North America, every spring and fall. Some birders claim nocturnal migration as their favorite time of year, since they never know which species they’ll find in their own yards as creatures pass through, off to nest elsewhere. Those travelers often belong to far-off flora, but they need dark skies as through lines.
A few hours from now, just down the road from where I’m crouched in shade clutching the blackened remains of an owl nest, Richard will step out into his front yard to see if it might be a clear night for peering into the universe. Around the same time, moonwatching birders will be stepping into their yards, curious about migratory birds, since spring nesting and migration seasons coincide.
After Richard determines if he’s going to send out his telescopes, he’ll go back inside his house to probe the far reaches of space via his computer. Some of the ornithologists might return to their computers, too, to look for birds in the form of burning clouds on weather-radar screens. But those employing the techniques of moonwatching will necessarily stay outside, away from artificial light.
An untold number of migratory birds will be moving over this neighborhood tonight, and the natural darkness of this street stands to protect them. They’ll be carrying birdsong to far-off places, to people who have no way of knowing that the chirps and whistles in their yards were, in part, made possible by this dark oasis. They might not even realize, as I didn’t until recently, that many of the brilliant feathers they appreciate in daylight were delivered by the winds of evening.