The Owlets

The owlets hatched last week, three balls of white fuzz with beaks that seem too big for their tiny faces. Falling into the so-funny-looking-they’re-cute category, the owlets hatched in Indiana. I know of their arrival because I am somewhat obsessed with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s barred owl cam, which documents life in the owls’ nest box.

Mother owl feeds the babies in this screenshot from the cam.

I have a thing for barred owls – and foxes and bears and various other creatures – in part because we hear them so often and have on occasion seen them perched on a birch tree in our field. Their Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you all? call is like a voice from the wild, reaching into our front yard at dusk or through the bedroom window in the darkest part of night.

I’ve taken to watching the owl cam this spring because it somehow provides a bit of calm and focus during a time when lots of things are changed, and lots of other things seem perpetually uncertain. The owls – and the other natural routines of the season – are a reminder that beyond our human perspective, the world goes on as usual.

The bloodroot is blooming beneath the sprawling branches of the old apple tree behind the vegetable garden, as it has every spring I’ve lived in this house. The trout lily and trillium are starting to poke through the leaf litter in the woods. The chickadees we see flitting about year-round have been joined recently by juncos and goldfinches and the ever-calling phoebes. We have a huge flock of robins roosting at the edges of the fields day and night. And last week we spotted a bluebird perched in the highbush cranberry.

The wood frogs are back in the pond across the road, and the peepers have joined the evening chorus, their bell-like trills mingling with the nasally buzz of the woodcock. The hawk has returned, too, evidenced by its high-pitched call far above us. Woodpeckers of several varieties rat-a-tat-tat trees with increased frequency.

These are the things that both captivate and ground me when I am outside, walking with the dog, playing with the kids, or tending to chores in the yard. I love the familiarity of the repeating seasons – and the discovery of things I don’t yet know, or have forgotten.

It is harder when I am inside, distracted by scrolling through headlines or social media feeds, where so much of the news is grim and unsettling. It is easy to get sucked into that online world of words, to let melancholy and unease settle in. And that’s where the owls come in. The owl cam has become my distraction from the news, my place of re-centering. When I find myself too distracted, or simply stuck in some task, I check in with the owls.

Sounds weird, I know, but somehow, taking a virtual peek into the nest gets me to refocus on what I should be doing. Helping kids with school, reading work emails, or editing pieces about other fascinating aspects of our natural world.

At first, the owl cam showed just the female owl, incubating her three eggs, occasionally preening feathers or stretching wings, but mostly still. Indiana is, it seems, a bit ahead of Franconia in spring’s progress, so the background soundtrack included spring birdsong well before I heard those songs here. Now, mother owl is regularly jostled by three hungry chicks clamoring to be fed, and the nest box is often littered with food – in the form of dead rodents and the scattered feathers of smaller birds. (Nature is, after all, not always clean and pretty.)

The other day I heard the hoo-hoo-hoo-hoooo of a New Hampshire barred owl as I stood on our front porch. I’ve not yet managed to locate a tree hollow where the owls we hear are likely to nest. But somewhere in our woods, I hope, some fuzzy owlets will soon hatch into the world.

 
Original content published by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul. This essay appears as Meghan's April 23, 2020 Close to Home column in the Littleton Record.

Reclaiming wonder

Spring rains drove the earthworms above ground one morning last week. This nearly caused us to be late to school, as the kids exclaimed over the sheer number of worms in the driveway, studied their thin, squiggly tracks through the sandy surface, and gently relocated several of them to the gardens.

The worms, and why they were out of their worm tunnels, were the topic of conversation all the way to school that morning – and a reminder of how little it takes to inspire wonder in the hearts and minds of children.

As a natural question asker, I like to think that I’m always striving to learn, to ponder, to look for answers. But there is something magical about the wonder of a child that even a robust adult curiosity can’t match. Often, adults are content to know what we know. Or perhaps we are too busy thinking of work and home and family logistics to follow the wandering trail of wonder very far. Sometimes we are moving too fast to notice the small things, or we contemplate a question only briefly before becoming distracted by some more pressing matter.

Children, though, are endlessly curious. They will ask, “Why?” and, “How?” until they reach some satisfactory conclusion. For them, it is completely natural to spend hours figuring out how to shore up the building-of-the-day in the sandbox, or construct sandy canals on a seashore beach, adjusting plans as the waves move water in and out.

Children are more willing than adults to pause along a favorite hike and admire the pink lady slippers hidden in the shade beside the trail. They examine and admire ordinary rocks, noticing the textures and colors and shapes. They wonder about the moles that leave mounds in the front lawn, rather than finding them a simple nuisance. They thoughtfully watch ants moving about their dirt domains, bees buzzing in flowers, and caterpillars creeping along leaves.

Since my children have been old enough to crawl through the grass, then walk through the woods, I have found my own sense of childish wonder revived as we explore our small piece of the world. As they grow older, the kids’ questions become more detailed, and we look for the answers together, leafing through field guides about birds and trees and butterflies, or turning to the Internet to identify a flower, learn more about our resident garden toads, or find out what the fox really says.

From the chairlift in winter, we wonder what animal made the tracks in the freshly groomed snow below. As we wander through the awakening landscape of spring, we notice all sorts of leaves growing on the forest floor and wonder which wildflower will bloom first – and where trout lilies and bloodroot got their names. During summer days at the beach, we watch hermit crabs scamper through tidal pools and wonder about all the other creatures living beyond the shore, far out in the vast ocean.

Whether it is the first pea shoot growing through the garden dirt in the springtime, the 100^th woolly bear caterpillar migrating in the fall, or the back-and-forth calls of our neighborhood barred owls, each discovery is brimming with the promise of new things to learn, new wonders to discover.

Amidst my children’s easy enthusiasm at even ordinary sights and sounds, I am inspired to look more closely at the small details, to take note of the exact colors of the sunrise and the delicate shape of an individual snowflake, to crouch down in search of the Jack-in-the-pulpit growing secretly beneath the rose hedge, to welcome the first song of spring peepers and the return of butterflies to the garden. My inner child awakens to reclaim the wonder.

Original content by Meghan McCarthyMcPhaul, posted to her Blog: Writings from a full life. This essay also appears as Meghan's Close to Home column in the Littleton Record.