Spring hootenanny

[sholio]

It's late and dark. Sitting with my laptop on the couch, I heard faintly what I supposed was distant owls, and went quietly outside onto the porch to listen. For a few minutes I was charmed by a call-and-response series of hoots, the very iconic "hoo-hoo ... hoo-HOO" pattern that I assume is great horned owls. After a few of these, I glimpsed a very large winged shape swoop across the slightly lighter city glow of the sky, flit across the sky above the yard and up to the darkness of the trees on top of the hills, where the hoot-and-answer resumed. (Now even louder, echoing faintly; it's such a deep, grand sound when they're close.)

I can now add "saw a great horned owl fly at night" to my list of life experiences. I've seen them sitting in the trees at twilight a few times, but never that.

Comments

[sholio]

Owl date!! Having clicked over to your post, what a cool experience for you! :D (And I hope the balcony bird was okay ...)

Yeah, I looked up owl calls afterwards and it was definitely an owl date, because the nearer one was a deep "HOO HOO HOO" and the farther had a lighter, twitter-ier quality, and from the recorded calls, the deeper was a female owl and the higher with a warble was a male. (Which goes to show what I get for making sexist assumptions about owls.) So I think it's likely that they were having a pleasant owlish nighttime hoot-off for spring baby-owl-making purposes. :D As you do, when you are an owl.