Let Inga Tell You: My neighborhood owls are quite a hoot

In the decades that we’ve lived here, we’ve watched various fauna populations come and go, especially birds.

We’ve always encouraged avian populations by putting feeders for hummingbirds and songbirds outside our windows. We even have a small outdoor aviary that previously housed the cockatiels that our older son bred for many years.

He ultimately married and moved to Santa Cruz, leaving us a cage full of cockatiels that can — and do — live 25 years.  As we’ve often counseled young parents: Never let your kids get a pet with a life expectancy greater than yours.

These days, the aviary houses parakeets that are mostly rejects from friends whose kids got bored with them. We’ve somewhat evolved into an avian social service agency.

For years we had an active blue jay population, the result of the five pounds of peanuts in the shell (believe me, it’s a lot of peanuts) we hid around our front yard as a party game for our younger son Henry’s fourth birthday. The kids got bored with it in nanoseconds, but word got out in the blue jay community that a peanut paradise had sprung up in our yard and to come on over!

The blue jays used to eat out of our hands as we breakfasted at our patio table. In addition to peanuts, they were also partial to English muffins and doughnuts, definitely mutations in their evolutionary diet.

Sadly, the blue jays have been gone for years, now replaced by crows. Lots and lots of crows. I’ve written about crows before and do have a genuine admiration for their language abilities, use of tools and problem-solving skills. I wish, however, we could be hearing a lot less of that language and that they weren’t intruding on the far smaller population of songbirds that bravely attempt to partake of our feeders.

Another bird population that really seems to have flourished in recent years, at least in my neighborhood, is the great horned owl. I really don’t remember hearing them all that often in past decades but now am hearing their distinctive sound almost every night, often communicating with other owls across nearby trees.

We hear the owls even with all our doors and windows closed. That’s largely because our house was built by the lowest bidder after the Second World War and still has most of its original 1947 single-pane windows. Almost all of our neighbors have remodeled over the years and gone to double-pane windows, which screen out a lot of noise.

A year ago, we had to break one of our double-hung windows (which by the way, still work well after 78 years) to free a bird trapped in it. Our handyman took a piece of glass to get it replaced and came back to report that our windows aren’t even single-pane. They’re … semi-single-pane? Point-five pane? Cheap glass available postwar? He reported that the hardware store guy hadn’t seen glass that thin in decades.

I’d gotten quite used to hearing owls at night and was able to determine which of the large trees near and on our property were their preferred habitats. So I was heartbroken when a beautiful star pine down the street housing a multitude of owls was cut down to make way for a pool. I wanted to throw myself in front of the chainsaw.

Even that was déjà vu to the late 1990s, when my husband, Olof, and I were volunteers on the baby songbird team for Project Wildlife. In the spring, tree trimmers would inadvertently cut down branches with nests full of baby birds, which would overpower the resources available and be farmed out to people like us who fed them a special formula (which, ironically, included cat food) every 30 minutes from dawn to dusk until they were old enough to be released.

I even took a cage of baby birds to work each day, prevailing upon co-workers to feed them if I had to attend a meeting. Alas, someone complained to HR (my boss?) and my career as a songbird savior was over.

Recently I ran into a neighbor who asked if I were hearing a lot of owls. So I’m not imagining that there seem to be a lot more owls out there now. We began to chat about why that may be.

One obvious reason they’re hanging around my house is that one of owls’ preferred food groups is rodents. On a number of occasions I’ve written about rodents and my ongoing efforts to discourage their presence on my property, which is the ultimate rodential Shangri-la. We have an orange tree that produces 1,000 oranges twice a year. Tons of foliage. A woodpile! Ivy! Bird feeders! Does it get better than this?

Is my prolific rodent population contributing to these birds’ presence? Am I singlehandedly responsible for the increase in owlage?

Now, any creature that eats rats is a friend of mine. I realize rats are just trying to make a living like the rest of us. I just wish they would make that living somewhere else.

In order to reduce the biggest draw to our rodent population — the oranges — our wonderful handyman, Oren, denudes the tree of oranges we don’t need twice a year and dispenses them like a Pied Piper of Citrus to friends and his other clients. It’s a win-win for everybody.

But in spite of that, the local rodents still like to hang out at our place.

So no wonder we’re hearing owls. That’s probably what all that hooting is about. “Hey guys, there’s this woodsy house that is a veritable Xanadu of well-fed rats. It’s like fishing in a barrel!”

Lying in bed at night listening to the owls hooting back and forth, I can only wonder what they’re saying. Are they inviting other horned owls over for a beer? Maybe a mating call of the “wanna see my etchings?” type?

Apparently each type of hoot — its pitch, rhythm, number of notes — is often unique to a particular species, allowing owls to identify and communicate with members of their own kind. The ones that live near me seem to have plenty to say to one another, and I really enjoy listening in.

I just wish I could speak owl well enough to let them know that the area behind the woodpile has particularly good pickings of the rodential persuasion.

Inga’s lighthearted looks at life appear regularly in the La Jolla Light. Reach her at inga47@san.rr.com.