Hailing from the North!

The past several days have been ridiculously cold.  The temperature last night said -1 °F.  The high today is predicted to be 10 °F.  Not my idea of going outside for adventure type of weather.  But sometimes there are things that are just too extraordinary to stay inside for.  I am not sure if it was the cold weather that brought this extraordinary thing to Moscow, ID, but whatever it was, I am grateful.

I stayed home from work Friday and today from church due to a cold that has decided to linger and get worse.  However I decided to spend part of the day outside in the painfully, freezing cold – all because of this little guy.

 

As a young paper delivery boy I despised birds.  I had been pooped on by one too many.  Well actually by that point it was three too many, with one getting my right on the crown while I was wearing my new Portland Trail Blazer’s hat at Disneyland.  Later on in life while as a car washer at a dealership in McMinnville, OR, I parked a freshly washed, new Civic Hybrid against the building perfectly between the lines just to get it bird bombed by some migrating geese.  From then on I thought twice about looking up in the air to see flying V’s.

So how did I change my mind about birds?  What caused me to go from having a desire to get a sling shot and goliath every bird I saw to going out in the below freezing cold and take pictures of them?  I blame it on my mother-in-law, Sydney Craft Rozen. 

Her unrelenting love of nature and animals started rubbing off on me in Kingston, WA, as we were looking out the windows at the various feeders and she was naming off the different birds that were coming in for a meal.  I thought I could never tell the difference between a goldfinch and a grosbeak, or a junco and a chickadee.  Well, I sort of can now. 

It was in Kingston that my 4 month pregnant wife said on a walk through the woods, “There is a big huge owl in the tree over here,” and I saw my first owl in the wild.  These stealthy and mostly hidden birds have awed me off and on throughout life, but mostly on now.  I have seen silhouettes of Great Horned Owls on drives home through the farmlands of the Willamette Valley, and a dead Barn Owl in an old grain silo.  I have seen them swooping across the road quickly and silently, and at the zoo zooming across the crowds of wiggling children and just as excited adults.  I go “owl hunting” around my home to listen for the owl calls that have resonated from treetop to treetop.

But this owl, this Northern Hawk Owl that is not from around here but from (as its name implies) the north, seemed like it wanted to be photographed, to be visited and observed.  It wasn’t hidden at all.  It didn’t want to be secret.  For almost a week it has been hanging out in the same spot in Moscow.  Three different times on Friday I went to see it.  I took both my sons at different times, and I was able to get right below it all three times I visited (once it was on a lamppost, and two times in two different trees). 

I drove over after dropping Joshua off at school and saw a photographer walking down the bike path, so I figured I’d follow him.  I saw the bird fly across a frozen creek bed and up to a lamppost overlooking Highway 8.  Minutes later it flew back across the stream to another lamppost where it stayed the remainder of that visit.   

 

I went back a couple of hours later in the midday light, and it was perched in a pine tree.  I couldn’t find it on my own and fortunately another photographer was wandering over there and pointed it out to me.  I went and got Henry (my 4 and two-thirds year old) and we watched the bird with some others.  When we went to get a closer look from the bike bath, it took off across the highway and landed in another tree.  Joggers, cyclists, photographers and dogs didn’t seem to bother this guy, but 4 and two-third year olds did. 

 

The last visit was with Joshua after getting him from school.  The owl was yet again in another tree and it allowed me to walk almost directly beneath it (thankfully it did not poop but I probably would have been ok … probably).  I got several more pictures before heading home for the warm indoors.

  

A beautiful, magnificent bird hailing from the north coming to Moscow for some unknown reason – perhaps to rekindle a love of birds in me.  But more likely get a nice vole belly.