Cowly Owl

As soon as we reached home with S and J (yes, I will continue working on our account of the trip), one of the barred owl parents made an appearance for our guests. Immediately, it was deemed a superb owl, and much photographed by Serge.

And I learned something from Serge and Joan, a phrase current when they were in university at Nantes. According to the French dictionary Le Petit Robert, the word 'chouette' is not only the noun for 'owl', but used as an adjective means pretty, elegant, worthy of admiration. This usage was first employed in 1830. Also, 'vachement' (literally, cow-like) has two meanings; informally, it can be dull or mechanical, reminiscent of a cow chewing cud, or, very informally, it can be an intensifier ('very') usually in a positive sense. Very nice. Really excellent. Vachement chouette. Cowly owl.

The owls made several appearances, visual and vocal, for our guests, for which we were grateful. They did not get a chance to see the owl chicks, however. Nor did we for a long time. It had been a wet spring, with an extraordinarily warm April, and the foliage burst out much earlier than last year, obscuring our views behind a green curtain. However, a few days ago we did get to see one youngster. The views were better by binocular than with camera, but I hope these photos are good enough to merit a glance.

At first we saw only one of the parents, hunched over in an odd position.

Later it turned to face the other way and spread its feathers.

I was inside with the kitchen window lowered. Joan moved to the deck to observe from a different angle, and this interrupted the feeding of robin chicks in the dogwood overhanging our deck. The parent would not approach the nest while a potential predator lurked nearby (Joan). Even with a mess of worms ready to deliver.

Then we spotted a chick deeper in the woods. I was kneeling on the floor at times to get the best view through the opened window.

That afternoon Joan called me downstairs to see the parent with some prey -- in binoculars it looked perhaps to be a very young squirrel -- standing next to the chick.

The parent would wave the prey in front of the chick. Sometimes it would be transferred from beak to claw and back. I assume the chick could have taken the morsel at any time, but it did not, and the parent did not render the corpse to offer smaller tidbits.

Finally the parent either lost patience with her offspring, or was too tempted for herself, and swallowed the young squirrel. The food took a while to inch down the owl's gullet; her head remained aimed at the sky for several minutes before she could lower it again.

I can just hear the parent saying, "if you won't eat this, then I will."