A Watcher in The Woods

by Dallas Lore Sharp

I began to climb. With this the bird lapsed into the quiet of despair, perched almost in reach of me, and began to hoot mournfully: Woo-hoo, woo-hoo, woo-hoo, oo-oo-a! And faint and far away came back a timid Woo-hoo, woo-a! from her mate, safely hid across the creek.

The weird, uncanny cry rolled round under the roof of limbs, and seemed to wake a ghost-owl in every hollow bole, echoing and reëchoing as it called from tree to tree, to die away down the dim, deep vistas of the swamp. The silent wings, the snapping beaks, the eery hoots in the soft gloom of the great trees, needed the help of but little imagination to carry one back to the threshold of an unhacked world, and embolden its nymphs and satyrs, that these centuries of science have hunted into hiding.

"She turned and fixed her big black eyes hard on me."

I wiggled above the bulge at the risk of life, and was greeted at the mouth of the cavern with hisses and beak-snappings from within. It was a raw spring day; snow still lingered in shady spots. But here, backed against the farther wall of the cavity, were two young owls, scarcely a week old, wrapped up like little Eskimos—tiny bundles of down that the whitest-toothed frost could never bite through.

"Wrapped up like little Eskimos."

Very green babies of all kinds are queer, uncertain, indescribable creations—faith generators. But the greenest, homeliest, unlikeliest, babiest babes I ever encountered were these two in the hole. I wish Walt Whitman had seen them. He would have written a poem. They defy my powers of portrayal, for they challenge the whole mob of my normal instincts.

But quite as astonishing as the appearance of the young owls was the presence beneath their feet of the head of a half-grown muskrat, the hind quarters of two frogs, one large meadow-vole, and parts of four mice, with many other pieces too small to identify. These all were fresh—the crumbs of one night's dinner, the leavings of one night's catch. If these were the fragments only, what would be a conservative estimate of the night's entire catch?

Gilbert White tells of a pair of owls that built under the eaves of Selborne Church, that he "minuted" with his "watch for an hour together," and found that they returned to the nest, the one or the other, "about once in every five minutes" with a mouse or some little beast for the young. Twelve mice an hour! Suppose they hunted only two evening hours a day? The record at the summer's end is almost beyond belief.