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.

The Foxes

My son spotted the first fox one morning last spring as we were on the way to school. There, in a field we pass multiple times a day, sat a small red fox, with black-tipped ears and bushy tail, who seemed to be gazing at the mountains.

So began my obsession with a local fox family.

We started looking for the fox each day, hoping its mom was in that field somewhere. One day, on the way home after dropping the kids at school, I saw two foxes. Soon, we realized there were four kits.

Through the next several weeks, as the hills evolved from brown to green and the temperatures warmed toward shorts and flip-flops weather, we saw the foxes almost daily. I would slow the car each time I passed the field and stare at what had before simply seemed a pile of rocks – but which we determined was the foxes’ den.

Sometimes, if I was driving by solo or out for a jog, I’d stop and watch the foxes from across the road. The kids loved to see them, too, but I was infatuated.

For about two weeks in June, we saw them every day, either on our way down the hill or on our way back up – sometimes both. They’d be perched in a spot of sunshine, alone or in pairs, sometimes the fuzzy ears of all four peeking above the rocks and tall grass. Often they’d be looking toward the mountains, sometimes curiously gazing at the road with their bright little eyes and black snouts.

We never did see a parent fox, and I imagined an exhausted mother and father – red foxes work together to raise their young – tuckered out inside the den after a night of hunting to provide enough to feed four fast-growing babies.

I imagined a den which had seemed snug and cozy at the end of winter, when the kids were newborn and tiny, becoming overcrowded as the little ones grew bigger – and figured Mama Fox probably kicked the increasingly boisterous crew out so she could get some rest: a fox’s variation of, “For crying out loud, go play outside!”

As the fox kits grew bigger, they also grew braver, wandering further from the den. I watched them hunt in the field and play-wrestle with each other. Once, I rolled down my window and scolded one of the kits for creeping too close to the sparse traffic. I was terrified we’d come down the hill one day and find a dead fox in the road.

Instead, the kits gradually disappeared from our view. Multiple sightings each day diminished to a couple a week, then none at all, as the nearly-grown foxes dispersed from their family unit.  

Still, I kept looking at the field, wondering where they were. Perhaps, I thought, they were wandering through the woods between the den and our house. Maybe they’d moved – safely – across the road and up the hill, or into some forest-edged fields closer to town. Or they’d grown into a more nocturnal schedule and were simply sleeping away the daylight hours in the same old den.

While it’s been months since we’ve seen the foxes in that field, I still look as we pass by their old den, hoping to see a glimpse of a ginger tail or the black tip of a fuzzy ear.

Over the years, our game camera has captured images of both red and gray foxes, and we see fox tracks through the field and along the Woods Road throughout the winter. This time of year, we often smell the subtly skunky scent red foxes leave at various posts throughout their territories during mating season.

Lately, I’ve noticed a series of tracks crisscrossing the crusty snow near where the foxes denned last spring. I’m hoping that means they are setting up house again, preparing for the next litter of kits, and that we’ll get to watch them emerge from the den come springtime to gaze at the mountains, watch the traffic go by, and carry on their foxy ways.

Original content by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul, posted to her blog, Writings From a Full Life. This essay also appears as Meghan's Close to Home column in the February 22, 2019 issue of the Littleton Record.