(HOST) Commentator Ted Levin thinks that some of the most interesting gifts are found in nature – and don’t come wrapped in paper.
(LEVIN) It was a derelict barn in northern Virginia. The floor of the hayloft was littered with hundreds of owl pellets. Most were little black castings filled with tiny, white bones and skulls wrapped in fur – the things an owl’s weak stomach acids can’t digest. But a few were bigger – three inches long and as thick around as my thumb.
Perched on beam, camouflaged by sunlight and shadows, stood a barn owl, long of leg and the palest of birds. Its bold black eyes set in an immaculately white, heart-shaped face measured my every step. When I took one step too many, the owl flew silently out a broken window.
I last saw a barn owl a dozen years ago, a specter on a dark night gliding low over a South Florida farm – hunting on the wing, which is the way of the tribe. Unfortunately, they’re rarely seen in Vermont. Four pairs were documented in the 1985 Vermont Breeding Bird Atlas – all in the Champlain Valley – but none in the recently completed Atlas. Barn Owls are casual nesters in northern New England. They have neither an insulating layer of fat nor a dense pile of feathers, so to survive winter, they must catch mice – lots of them.
Barn owls hunt with ears and eyes in concert, and they have the most acute hearing of any bird species. In 1962, longtime Woodstock resident and cetacean biologist, Roger Payne, then of Cornell University, determined that in a pitch-black room a barn owl could catch a furtive mouse just by listening. The owl has two asymmetric, semi-lunar shaped ear openings, that run the length of it’s head just behind two parabolic face discs. The discs gather and reflect sound back to each ear; while the owls’ pointy, hatchet-shaped face segregates the sound each ear receives. The result: a one-bird triangulation unit.
A barn owl sailing face down over a meadow, gathering and processing sound, is Earth’s most proficient mousetrap. To compensate for the boom and bust dynamics of prey populations, barn owls tend toward big families and multiple broods. In one night a family of eleven may consume a hundred or more rodents, each swallowed whole, head first, the owls’ black eyes blinking.
The Virginia owl crossed a meadow and disappeared into a confusion of vines and branches, a pale bird beneath a pale sky, swallowed by dark woods. I returned the following morning, looked up through a hole in the hayloft floor and saw the barn owl perched on a beam, with it’s head cocked in that owlish-sort-of-way, looking down at me, and listening intently.
We brought a few pellets back to Vermont, where my son and I tweezed several apart – gifts from a night bird that sees and hears things that humans cannot. We unwrapped five complete skulls – four voles and a shrew. But we’re saving the rest for those middle nights of Hanukkah when we’re tired of shopping – little packages from the natural world – educational, communal, and fun to open.
AP Photo/Columbus Zoo