ONE OF MY favorite things about living in my new town was the local coffee shop, La Costa Coffee Roasters, established long before a Starbucks anchored every neighborhood shopping mall. Their breakfast blend is beyond compare. Plus, they had a gift shop filled with owl merchandise. It was almost like being at Grandma’s house. I bought a stuffed owl one morning and mentioned to the owner, John, that I was an owl fanatic.
“In fact,” I said, yelling over the bean roaster, “I have been taping wild owl sounds for several years now.” I took a chance that he might be an owl buff, too. “So if you ever hear about any nesting owls around here, let me know and I’ll tape them.”
“The owls? Okay, that’s fine,” he yelled back.
“No, not toy owls, real owls,” I shouted.
“Yeah, they’re here,” he yelled again.
“No, I mean living owls, like a nesting pair.”
“Yup, they’re still here,” he said again, looking annoyed.
Having trouble getting through to him, I clarified: “No, John, what I mean is I’m looking for a pair of barn owls that I can watch at night and tape-record.”
He turned off the machine.
“And I’m telling you that, yes, we have real barn owls. Why do you think my shop has all this owl stuff?
“You…you have an owl nest?” I said, incredulous.
“Yup. They’ve nested here for four years now. And they’re so noisy that the first year I thought I’d lose business. But the weirdest thing is no one even notices them. People eat outside while the owls fly right over their heads and scream. No one even looks up. On Saturday nights we have live music out there and the owls almost drown it out, but nobody says a word. People are strange.”
I couldn’t believe my luck. “Could you show me where exactly?” I asked.
“Sure.” He wiped his hands on a towel and we went out the side door.
He pointed to the top of a decorative stucco tower.
“The nest is up there under the tower roof,” he said.
I had struck gold. I could park my Toyota Celica right below the tower next to the coffeehouse and have a clear view.
“It’s a good thing the cleanup crew gets here really early,” said John. “In the morning there are mouse parts all over the place and these brown fur balls. What are those things anyway?”
“They’re owl pellets.” I explained how owls digest their mice and cough up the bones and fur.
“That sounds miserable…like a cat choking up hairballs,” he replied. “I had no idea, I just figured owls pooped a lot.”
We went back inside and he turned the coffee roaster back on. “Have a good day! Thanks so much!” I yelled. “Good luck.” He waved.
I couldn’t wait to visit these owls, so that evening I took a nap and drove down to the coffeehouse at around 2:00 a.m. By then the movie theater had let out and the parking lot was empty. I rolled down my window and, sure enough, heard the unearthly din of five screaming barn owl babies clustered on top of the tower roof with their mother, begging for food. The oldest and most developed owlet began hopping between the tower and the roof of the main building, with an assist from fledgling wings.
The father owl was hunting frantically, shuttling back and forth from the nearby open field, each time with a mouse in his beak. He was having no trouble finding mice, but the babies were so ravenous he could barely hunt fast enough to please them. Poor guy, I thought. I bet he’s just exhausted by morning. I opened my sunroof and set the tape recorder on top of my car. The owls were used to cars, so they ignored my presence.
The father was noticeably smaller than the mother, with mostly white feathers underneath. Female barns owls are usually darker than the males, but that’s just a rule of thumb, so it can still be hard to tell them apart. The main difference is size. The female is about a third larger than the male and much more aggressive. In most of the nests I’ve observed, the mother is a screaming banshee—hell on wings—and the father is a “dear old dad” type—pretty laid back and mellow. Their personalities make sense. The female has to defend the nest and the male has to stay focused on hunting and not get easily frustrated. If he weren’t mellow, he’d have abandoned the screaming bunch a long time ago; but he’s patient to a fault.
The father continued to hunt while the babies and mother screeched and jockeyed for position on the tower, anticipating his next delivery. I was watching this owl family drama for a couple of hours, recording a fascinating variety of vocalizations, when a delivery truck pulled into the parking lot. The sun had not yet risen, though the dark sky was softening on the horizon. The driver began unloading supplies for the coffeehouse and carried a box across the outdoor eating area to a locked storage room.
The mother owl was already worked up, and now her territory was being invaded. She chirped to her babies and they hunched up next to her, silently. Then she stood on the edge of the roof, gathered herself, and dived straight down with a shrill scream. It was like no sound I’d ever heard from an owl, more like the scream of an enraged eagle, and even from a distance it about burst my eardrums. At the last moment she pulled up, both talons spread out with claws bared, and raked the air over the man’s bald head, missing by an inch. Then she flew back up to the top of the tower.
The man didn’t even notice! He didn’t flinch, didn’t look up, didn’t change his bored, trudging stride. Nothing.
The mother owl was as perplexed as I was. Perhaps she needed to do it again. And this would be a good lesson for the owl babies, who had stopped their constant roughhousing and screeching to watch her intently. So she tried again, producing an even more vicious screech. She slicked her body tightly for speed and dived straight down, pulling up at the last second, talons raking over his head, missing by just a wisp of air. Again he paid no attention at all!
By this time, I was pressing my face into a pillow, trying to muffle my laughter. I didn’t want to mess up the recording.
It never crossed my mind that the deliveryman was in danger. The mother owl just wanted to scare him off, though it certainly wasn’t working. He continued unloading supplies. Unless that deliveryman was deaf, he had to have heard those earsplitting screeches. And how could he not have noticed the air currents from a rather large object that was practically flying into his head? Somehow, the guy had completely tuned out his immediate environment. For him, this was a tedious morning like any other that he needed to forge through.
Shortly after the deliveryman left, I packed up my equipment and pulled out of the parking lot, exhausted but happy with the success of my recording session. I hoped Dr. Penfield would find some interesting and unusual owl sounds. I was sure he’d heard every vocalization wild owls could make, but for me it was a thrill hearing them firsthand. I still had much to learn from barn owls.
When I got home Wesley greeted me with his chatter of unfettered joy. He certainly knew how to live in the moment. Never jaded, he was always so happy and boisterously expressive whenever I returned from my short trips away. He would update me with chirps, twitters, long patterns of exuberant cries, and even tiny hisses when he recalled something that had happened during the day that he didn’t like—such as someone besides me feeding him. In that instance, he’d stare at the place where that person had stood and hiss while recalling the hand that fed him. Then he’d go on with his daily update. If he had been sleeping, he’d turn, hop up to the dowel, then do a long arabesque with one wing and leg stretching back.
I had the tape recorder with me so I popped in a fresh cassette and left it running while I unleashed Wesley. He played all over the room, chattering and commenting on this and that. He always “talked” about almost everything.
“Okay, Mr. Constant Comment,” I told him, “you sure have a lot of good things to say to Dr. Penfield’s machine tonight.”
Wesley flew up to the top of the curtain rod then down to my bed and upon landing, bent over the quilt quizzically, looking under each fold to see if there were any surprises. Perhaps he could even wedge himself in there. He poked his head into the fold. No, his body wasn’t going to fit. He cried, “Reek reek reek reek!” and leapt into the air, pouncing on his personal pillow. He then looked over at me with great interest as I sat on my side of the bed.
“Bzzzzztttthhhhh,” he screeched (some people say it sounds like a handsaw when owls make this quiet screech), asking for a magazine.
“Do you want one of these magazines, Wes?” I asked.
“Twitter twitter” was his answer, i.e., “yes.”
“Okay, here you go.”
He started ripping it up. After a while he got tired of this and wanted to cuddle, so he came over to me with soft twitters and chirps, some barely audible. I still had the recorder running. He and I talked quietly back and forth, his soft sounds recorded for the first time. Then he climbed into my arms and fell asleep, lying as always on his stomach with his feet dangling, head in my left hand. As I stroked his neck feathers and ears, he made such tiny sounds that I couldn’t actually hear them. I could only feel his diaphragm moving. I answered with an almost equal softness to let him know I’d “heard” him.
Over the following week I spent the wee hours of every morning at La Costa coffeehouse tower recording the wild barn owls. The owl babies soon began taking short flights to nearby trees, sometimes settling there for the day. Now customers were starting to notice the owls and to mention them to John. They were so beautiful that they began to attract a small audience of bird watchers during business hours. But between 2:00 and 5:00 a.m. I had them all to myself.
I decided to venture out of my car, since the owlets were now flying all over the place and getting hard to see from only one location. I was careful to move slowly, and for whatever reason, the owl mother didn’t harass me, maybe feeling that by now her babies could fend for themselves. But I could see that the father was running out of strength, looking peaked and downright unhealthy. He was still hunting constantly with the pressure of owl babies screaming at him, only now they were actually attacking him when he flew into the tower with a mouse. They had grown as big as he was and he wasn’t taking it very well. He couldn’t keep up with their demands.
I thought of the big bag of frozen mice just up the hill at my apartment. I just couldn’t stand watching him exhausted and frazzled, hunting like mad only to get pushed around every time he brought food home. He was so faithful—trying so hard.
I drove back home, grabbed a big bag of mice, and defrosted enough to feed the entire owl family for twenty-four hours. This should give Mr. Owl a break, I thought. I returned to my parking spot and got out of the car with the bag. If I could just throw the mice, one by one, up to the top of the roof, then surely the babies would eat their fill and the father could have a night off. I took one mouse, wound up my arm, and threw it with all my might. It fell painfully short of the top of the tower. I had never been good at this kind of thing. I tried again and again, but there was no way to get any pitching power out of my arm.
So, here I was at 2:00 in the morning at a shopping mall throwing dead mice into the wind like a crazy person. I had become so intent on my task that I was completely startled to discover myself surrounded by a group of teenagers clad in black leather with piercings, tattoos, shaved heads, and muscle.
I felt very alone, very small, very blond, and scared out of my wits. They were just staring at me.
Finally, the biggest among them said, “What are you doing?”
“Uh…” My heart was in my throat. I pointed up. “See those owls?”
“No, I don’t see any owls.”
“Well…there’s a nest of barn owls up there. And the father, uh, he’s exhausted because he’s been hunting and hunting for a couple of months, every night, and the babies are overwhelming him. He can’t hunt fast enough to keep up with them. See, if you look right up there, that’s him.”
I pointed again.
The tough kid looked up, “Oh! Okay, yeah, I see him.”
“And you hear that loud screaming? That’s the babies.”
“That sound is baby owls? No f____ing way!”
He was interested, to my surprise. Perhaps this was not my last night on earth after all.
“Okay, there’s a baby in that tree over there, see, and the rest are on top of the roof.” All of the kids craned their necks to see.
“And I’ve been trying to throw these mice up there to give the dad a break, but I just don’t have a throwing arm and, well, there are mice all over the patio now ’cause I just can’t get them up that far.”
For the first time they looked around and saw dead mice littering the concrete, then the big plastic bag full of dead mice, and finally, the four I had in my hand.
“Oh, dude. This chick is throwing mice up to these owls! No way, man!” I could hear them all commenting to each other “Rad!”
The ringleader stepped up and said, “I can throw. Give me those mice.”
Amazed, I found myself placing four cold limp mouse carcasses into his huge palm. He hurled each one with pinpoint accuracy right up to the top of the roof, and the owl babies pounced on the mice and powered them down. Then he gestured for the bag and I handed it to him. The rest of the kids started throwing the mice that were lying around on the concrete.
“Gross! Wow! Get that one! Get that one, Mike! Yeah! Got it! All right!” They gave each other high fives every time a mouse was on target. Then they’d watch the baby owl devour it. “Look at that guy eat that thing! He’s eating it whole. That’s rad, man. Cool!”
“Dude, I’ve never seen real owls before. Do they only eat mice?” asked the big kid who had first approached me, then he stopped short, wondering the obvious. “Where did you get mice at two in the morning? What are you doing with a big bag of them?”
I explained that I had been studying owls all my adult life and had majored in biology and worked with scientists.
“Man, that’s what I want to do!”
They threw all the mice until the owlets were sated and sleepy. The mother finally calmed down, and even the father was full of food and relaxed. The little owl family didn’t seem to mind our presence at all.
Sitting along a concrete wall, the kids and I had a fascinating discussion about owls and their ways. Then we gave each other high fives, and they melted into the night. I was left standing there beneath the tower as the early-morning ocean fog rolled in, watching the owls resting with full stomachs and enough mouse snacks to last well into the following evening.
DR. PENFIELD E-MAILED that he needed his recording equipment back. “Bring any tapes you have made so we can listen to them,” he said. We scheduled a day for me to visit his office at Caltech. Living two hours away, it’d been a long time since I’d dropped by. I missed the people and atmosphere there and was looking forward to an opportunity to reconnect.
Because Dr. Penfield was so respected in his field, I was intimidated to talk with him, but he was always gracious.
“Have a seat,” he said, on the day of my visit, pushing aside piles of papers and books.
I set up the recorder and started playing the screams of the wild mother owl protecting her babies. He was fascinated by the range of sounds and asked me to narrate the accompanying owl behavior. I then played Wesley’s intimate vocalizations as we snuggled and played with magazines, as well as Wesley’s chattering “updates” when I came home from work. Dr. Penfield peppered me with questions and scribbled notations.
“What else do you have?” he asked.
“Well, uh…well, here’s one with Wesley’s nesting call. Although, I’m sure you’ve heard that in the aviaries at night, right?”
I handed him the tape and he inserted it into the player and listened. We went through the foot stamping and “re-EEK re-EEK re-EEEK” of his nesting calls.
“Okay, he’s found a nesting spot, and has possibly added his own improvements to it, such as a ripped-up magazine,” I explained.
“So you know for sure that this is a male?” he asked.
“Yes,” I answered. But he patiently suggested that I might not be able to be as certain as I thought I was.
“Oh, I know he’s a male, Dr. Penfield,” I said.
He lifted an eyebrow, then continued the tape. “Okay, go on.”
“Well, he’s decided that the nest is ready for eggs, so he’s calling his mate…uh…ahem…he’s calling me to the nesting site…you see…he thinks I’m his mate…[cough cough].”
If Dr. Penfield hadn’t been such a distinguished gentleman, it might not have been so difficult, but he had this aura of…well, of being so darned distinguished. Everyone felt it. Sitting in his office was like sitting in church.
“He is bonded to you as a mate?” Dr. Penfield raised both eyebrows this time and paused the tape. “One moment, Stacey.”
He slipped out of his office and to my horror called in several postdocs. He rewound the tape.
“Good morning, everyone. This owl, Wesley, has bonded to Stacey here as his mate.” He gestured to me and I managed a weak smile. He hit Play. Wes started his nesting call again, but then the sound changed and Dr. Penfield said, “Now, what exactly is he doing here?”
“Well, uh, this is the part where I come up to the nest.” The office felt very hot and stuffy.
Wesley was making little awking sounds of familiarity and affection. Then there was a more urgent “ur ur ur…urururAWRk urk urk AAAWWRRRK…ur ur ur ur…ur ur ur AAAAWWRK.”
Dr. Penfield’s eyes widened and he paused the tape again. “What is this sound? I have never heard this before!” he said.
“Well…he’s positioned himself over my arm and…” More postdocs began to arrive. I heard whispers in back of me. “Have I missed anything?” “Yeah, the owl thinks she is his mate…”
“How?” Dr. Penfield continued. “How is he positioned over your arm, exactly?”
“Okay…well…uh…Okay…let’s see…ummm…he’s holding on to my left arm with both of his feet, gripping with his talons. I have my right arm perpendicular to my left arm, between his feet—he’s grabbing hold of my right arm, uh, with his knees…” (There was a titter from a postdoc.) “…The first time, I tried to fight him off, but it always becomes a physical battle unless I just let him go through with it…and…er…well…”
Dr. Penfield was growing more and more enthusiastic. I was becoming less and less enthusiastic.
“Oooh! So your arms are like this and he is like this,” he positioned one arm where my arm would be and his hand where Wes would be. “Am I right?”
“Yeah, that’s it.” The postdocs leaned in. I slid down into my chair wanting to disappear.
“And then what is this repeated sound?” He asked.
“Uh…well…uh…that’s…well each ‘ur ur ur ur’ indicates him dipping down onto my arm and clutching with his knees and, well…um, rubbing on my arm sort of, and, well…you know.” (I heard increased chortles of delight behind me.)
“Aaahh! I seeee! So those are the ‘ur ur ur.’ “He imitated the sound and indicated the movement of the owl on my arm by using his hand on his arm.
“Yes,” I muttered in agony.
“Well, then,” he continued, “What is the final AAAAWRK AAAAAWRK AAAAWRK sound then?”
“Okay, well…that’s the actual, the…the…well…the actual…I guess you’d say it’s the…” (“Hee hee hee” wheezed a voice behind me. I wanted to punch the guy.) Now the boss was just beside himself.
“Do you mean to say he actually has an orgasm on your arm? How do you know? Does he ejaculate? Is there actual sperm?!?”
“Oh, yes,” I managed to say, “there’s sperm. He ejaculates, all right.”
“How much sperm? Is there a lot? How do you know it is sperm? Did you look at it under the microscope?” (The voices behind me were now choking with glee.)
My answers came out in rapid fire.
“About one-eighth of a teaspoon. Yes, I looked under my microscope, and it is definitely sperm.”
Dr. Penfield slapped his desk. “These are new sounds! And no wonder you knew he was a male!” He started delegating responsibilities to the postdocs. One ran to get the equipment. Another loaded the tape into the computer, and they all sat around while the contents of the cassette slowly appeared on the screen as sonograms. As each one came up, I explained every urk and ark and ur and de-Deep and mutter and grunt and chirrup, while another PhD sat taking notes madly.
One woman asked if she could use my data for the PhD she was working on. Since I didn’t intend to pursue a PhD, I gave her permission. There was loose talk of my perhaps getting all of this on video and bringing that in, too, but it wasn’t followed up, thank goodness.
At the end of the day Dr. Penfield told me, “Stacey, perhaps the most interesting aspect of your tapes is that you have fifteen or twenty different complete sequences of Wesley’s mating vocalizations, and none of them is exactly the same. If his mating act were purely instinctive, then the sound sequences would be identical every time, like a birdsong. But there is so much variation in his expressions that one has to conclude that each sequence is an individualized experience from the owl’s point of view.”
I beamed. This was additional confirmation that owls are anything but simple. Wesley and other owls are emotional and show their feelings. They are intelligent and communicate their thoughts in creative ways that we don’t always recognize. In fact, many of the higher animals are not really that different from us, they are just “other.”