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.

Spring Cacophony

Spring is such a raucous season. Unfolding from winter’s relative quiet, spring opens with the musical call of peepers from just-thawed ponds and the varied songs of birds returning, the noise building to an impressive crescendo that ebbs and grows throughout each day.

Last weekend I escaped to the front porch for a few stolen moments of solitary peace. Only they weren’t solitary – or peaceful, really. All around me there was noise and movement. A catbird meow-called from the highbush cranberry in the front yard. The whir of wings revealed a hummingbird was exploring the flowers in the planters on the upstairs porch railing. The piercing screech of a hawk drew my eyes upward, where two raptors spun circles far, far above. They seemed too high to be hunting; just playing on the breeze.  

On short evening rambles with the dog, as most birdsong quiets with the approach of darkness, we hear the beautifully melancholic trilling of the hermit thrush from the woods. The peepers are just warming up then, testing out their voices for another night of singing for love – or at least reproductive prospects. By the time I am in bed, with the windows open to the welcome warmth of the spring night, the singing of these tiny frogs is a boisterous, chiming cacophony, one of the wonders of nature that amazes me no matter how many times I hear it.

The robins lead the chorus that awakens me on spring mornings with their rambling, cheery singing. A varied choir of other birds joins in: the question-and-answer of the red-eyed vireo, the ovenbird’s somewhat screechy “teacher-teacher-teacher,” and the white-throated sparrow singing, “Old Sam Peabody-Peabody-Peabody.” There are song sparrows and goldfinches, phoebes and slate juncos – and the chickadees and nuthatches who’ve stayed with us all year. It seems impossible that one yard contains such a variety of birds – and birdsong – and I’m sure I’ll never learn them all. That kind of noise is nice, anyway, whether or not I know – or see – who’s making it.

Not all the twittering happens from tree branches or the pond, of course. Tom turkeys gobble as they make their way along the paths through the back field. A gang of crows yell their caw-caws at a red fox as he meanders through the yard in the early morning, patrolling the invisible borders of his territory before trotting off to some quieter spot.

Amid all of this noisy nature, we humans contribute to the sounds of spring, too. The drone of lawnmowers returns to yards everywhere. Bicyclists call to each other as they ride past in spandex-clad pairs. The hum of sporadic traffic drifts through open windows. And if there is a baseball game at the school two miles down the road, the cheers drift into our yard, and I pause to silently root for the home team.

Even the appearance of spring, once the season really gets going, is a bit noisy. The grass, finally, turns a bright, lush green. Leaves unfurl on trees. New vegetation pushes through last year’s dieback in the field, and lupine leaves grow higher and fuller, moving toward the plants’ burst of color – coming soon. The apples trees are blooming now, all white and pink, and the buds on the lilacs are opening into a cascade of purple and the sweet scent of almost-summer.

These pastel hues will build toward summer’s audacity of color, when a cacophony of blooms bursts forth from the gardens and fields. By then, the peepers will have quieted and the birdsong will have started its slow fade, as birds move from attracting mates and establishing territories to hatching and feeding broods of chicks. (Who has time to sing when the kids are demanding food all day long?)

But now, in these days of approaching summer, when winter has really and truly faded into a cold and provisional memory, the sounds of spring rouse me from sleep in the welcome brightness of early morning. All the noise and color draw me into this season, growing from the last, rolling into the next. 

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 May 27, 2016 edition of the Littleton Record.

Almost one of those days

Today was very nearly a bad day. I woke early, after a relatively sleepless night, and wondered how the heck I was going to make it through – especially with three tired kids home on school vacation and not a plan penciled into the calendar. (The littlest one has developed an intense fear of spiders and lady bugs, and since our old house is the site of many springtime hatches of the latter, she often simply refuses to go to – or stay – asleep.) The forecast called for sunny skies, but the morning was dull and gray, matching the fogginess inside my head.

Biker girls

And then, not long after breakfast, the clouds were suddenly gone, the sky clear and blue. We tumbled out the door around 9 o’clock this morning, and we didn’t come in until 3, and then just for a short breather. Within minutes of exiting the house into the mid-morning sunshine, we had shed our sweatshirts for short sleeves, welcoming the warmth on our winter-white skin.

We raked the thatch from the lawn in front of the flower bed, weeded said bed and cleaned out the winter litter, and started turning the dirt in the vegetable garden to prepare it for the seeds we’ll drop there as soon as the sun has adequately warmed the dark earth. I pounded stakes for the pea trellis into the soft ground and returned to the front yard to find the kids in an impromptu t-ball game. That littlest one might be afraid of ladybugs, but not of much else, and she has a wicked swing of the bat.

The kids have been begging to eat outside, a request I denied just yesterday when the temperature was chilly enough for hats and mittens. But today it seemed shameful to be in if we could be out, so we lunched al fresco. Partway through our leftover pizza, we heard a familiar bird call that told us the hawk (broad-winged, I think) from last year was back. About an hour later I saw her flit past the still-bare apple trees toward the woods and the nest from last year, built high in an old white birch tree along the woods road.

We went for a walk to visit the grandparents around the corner. My son mastered riding his bike sans training wheels, striving to keep up with his twin sister, who has been pedaling free for weeks now. The “big girl bike” for the littlest one arrived at our doorstep, was assembled with only moderate consternation, and now she’s in the biking mix, too. We ate dinner on the porch, with background music provided by the peepers in the pond across the road, then rode bikes around the driveway some more.

Yep, today could have been tough. Instead, thankfully, it was beautiful in so many ways. It’s a gamble, during April vacation, to stick around northern New England. It could be snowing. It could be 70 degrees and sunny. It could be 40 and raining. Many of my children’s classmates and their families have fled for the week to safely sunny Florida, or at least as far south as New York City.

But today, the gamble paid off. The sun came out. The coffee kicked in. The kids played hard, and they are wiped. I hope they sleep tonight.

Original content by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul, posted to her Blog: Writings from a full life.

Changing pace

The merit of changing life’s pace hit me several summers ago, when I spent a few afternoons each week working as a docent at The Frost Place in Franconia. I’ve always enjoyed stopping to smell the roses – both figuratively and literally – but I had recently entered into a new stage of my life, one that involved two babies and plenty of hectic.

Five months earlier, I had become the mother of twins. After several years as a small-town newspaper reporter, with a finger on the pulse of the local communities and a schedule as unpredictable as the news, I was immersed in a new reality of relatively sleepless nights and baby talk, dirty diapers and midnight feedings, caring for two little beings when I’d only really ever had to take care of myself. I’d started doing a little writing from home, but getting out of the house – by myself – was emancipating.

Some days at the farmhouse just down the road and around the bend, where the poet Robert Frost lived nearly 100 years ago, were busy with visitors. Others were quiet, and I would be left alone with poems to read and a couple acres of semi-tamed field and forest and garden to explore. I began noticing wildflowers I’d maybe seen before but never really looked at closely, finding monarch caterpillars munching leaves in a thick stand of milkweed (and, later, their chrysalises, then emerging butterflies), trying to identify the array of birdsong floating through the air and creating its own form of poetry.

One of the books in our small shop in Frost’s former barn – the National Audubon Society’s Field Guide to New England – became my go-to source for information on my new discoveries. At summer’s end, the Dartmouth College intern with whom I had shared docent duties presented the book to me as a parting gift.

The two children who were babies that summer are now 5-year-olds and have a little sister. We look at the book together often, revisiting familiar information and searching its pages to find the new plants and animals we’ve seen or heard. It’s fitting that the book came from a place where Frost lived, as the poet reportedly loved wandering through the local landscape, botanizing all the way.

Life certainly hasn’t become any less hectic since that summer at The Frost Place, with a growing work load of writing projects and three active kids. But as much as life becomes busier with children, it also grows more inquisitive. “Why?” and “How?” are favorite questions, asked endlessly, and we alter the pace of our lives to allow for discovery.

We wander through the fields and forests around our house often, in all kinds of weather, in every season. Moving at a child’s pace, I notice more than I would if I were running or cross-country skiing or biking solo. Looking at the landscape from a child’s perspective becomes a learning experience for all of us.

As we slow down we discover endless wonderful things: the petals of trout lilies curl backwards toward the sunlight, the white springtime blossoms of wood anemones are tinted pink on their backsides, the flowers of the small purple violets growing wild in the woods are shaped like butterflies.

In the spring we listen for the peepers calling from the nearby pond and creep as quietly as we can to the water’s edge; it is never quietly enough to catch one of the tiny frogs in the act of singing. In summer we watch the lupine plants grow higher each week until they burst in purple spikes that fill the back field, and we know where the best stashes of wild blackberries are. In fall, we look for signs of bear along the trail that meanders through the old apple orchard. The tracks through new snow in winter tell us which animals have passed by recently, and we can tell where the red squirrels like to eat by the deep piles of pinecone scales beneath tall trees.

We still get caught up in the craziness of school and meetings, t-ball and swimming lessons, paying the bills and buying the groceries and tending to the endless piles of laundry. But we take the time, especially when things get crazy, to change pace. Change is good, so the saying goes; variety is the spice of life.

A version of this essay appears in this week’s Record-Littleton.