This morning after a few hours revising and writing, I went outside to work in my garden in my attempt to balance the mental acitivty with the natural world (including physical exercise) and was horrified to find a dead owl in my back garden lying in the leaves and ivy beneath a camellia, as if he had simply fallen out of the pecan tree or fell off my 6 ft. wooden fence. He looks as if he’s just sleeping.
I knew I had a raptor in my back yard, but thought it was a red-tailed hawk because I saw it and often heard it throughout the day. There may still be a red-tailed hawk. From what I can gather online, I'd identify the dead bird as barred owl. They often take over red-tailed hawk, crow, or squirrel nests since barred owls don’t make their own. Barred owls are territorial and don’t migrate, living in one place and hunting within a mile. They hang out on the fringes of forests alongside red-tailed hawks so they can see across fields. There's an empty lot which looks mroe like a field these days.
No rigor mortis had set in and I can‘t find any wounds on the body. So now I wonder, did it die of starvation, poison or old age? Since I’m highly allergic to chemicals, I only garden organically making my own compost and I never use chemical fertilizers or insect killers. I’m highly bothered by this. Event though it’s a small owl, only 12 inches, not counting the tail, I’ve never seen such a large bird in the wild this close before, even though I’ve seen many hawks and one snowy owl flying while hiking. Timing is too much of a synchronistic event (as I’ve spoken about in previous posts), since another owl, a much larger owl, perhaps a Great Horned owl, flew over our heads as we left our writer’s meeting in downtown Greenville last week. I blogged about this a few blogs ago and as I mentioned, I'm a believer of bird omens and use them frequently in my writing.


They suggest I incinerate or bury it because it's illegal to own even a feather fiom a raptor. Perhaps I'll may bury it next to my cat, Shisha.
So strange... I hope terrible things aren't about to happen to us all. Did you see there was another earthquake this morning, in Turkey? I'm just focusing on the now as much as I can... it's all we can do, right?
ReplyDelete