Bubo, the Great Horned Owl (American Woodland Tales)

by Jean Craighead George

  In late January, Black Talon roosted on the nest during the day, as if her unlaid eggs were already there. Bubo slept nearby in his leafy beech tree. During this time warm winds blew in from the Gulf of Mexico and the land began to thaw.

  On the third day of February, Black Talon laid her first egg. It was as long as a chicken’s egg, white and almost round. It was over two inches in length and was just two inches across. The shell was thick and rough.

  Black Talon could not leave the nest now for more than a few minutes at a time, for the night of February third was freezing cold. Bubo saw that Black Talon was not going to hunt with him that night and he understood what must be done. He flew to the abandoned meadow and perched on the beech stub. He watched for the mice to come out of their burrows and travel across the snow to harvest the seeds from the pigweeds. A meadow vole did just this. Bubo struck. Quietly he returned to the nest along his skyway through the trees.

  He alighted on a maple that grew beside the crooked beech. Black Talon saw him swoop in and perch. She stood up, carefully placing her big feet on either side of the egg. A talon grazed it as softly as a wisp of down. She stepped gently into the air and on set wings dropped to the limb where Bubo awaited her. She took the mouse, gulped it, and returned to the nest. There she opened her breast feathers and settled lightly over the egg. The bare incubation patch on her belly touched the egg and warmed it. The incubation patch was designed to bring the greatest warmth to the eggs. The patch was featherless and was ruddy from a rich supply of blood. With this brood patch she kept the egg warmer than a hot summer day, almost one hundred degrees.

  The next night another egg lay beside the first. The clutch was complete. This was the beginning of Bubo’s and Black Talon’s family, and on this night they began their long hard fight to bring young owlets into the woodland. It was no easy task to hatch and raise owlets in a forest where no one befriended them.

  The warm spell passed and the cold of February settled upon the land. The thawing creek iced over. The dark days ware flurried with snow. A blizzard blew in from the west. Bubo took shelter low in his beech tree. Parus, the titmouse, and his band retreated to the dense creek forest, out of the path of the wind. There they fed on the lee side of the trees. They found bare ground under the overhang of the creek bed and in the densest parts of the snow-arched grapevine thickets. When the storm reached its height, the titmice retreated to their night roosts and fluffed into warm round balls. Dendrocopus, the downy woodpecker, had holed up in his cavity almost an hour before the titmice. He heard them coming home to roost, poked his head from his hole, and looked at the storm. He pulled it in again, the land was cheerless.

  High in the crooked beech Black Talon shifted carefully on her eggs and faced the storm. She pulled her head deep into her shoulder feathers and rested her bill on the rim of the nest. Her feathers were fluffed to keep her as warm as possible. Silent and alone she sat in the storm. The snow piled around the edge of her nest and upon her back. From time to time she shook herself free of the cold blanket. Beneath her the precious eggs were warm even though around her the air was zero.

  The blizzard roared two days and two nights. Black Talon did not leave the nest. Bubo flew to the sugarhouse during a lull in the storm to hunt for food. He found none. On the third day the storm spent itself. The wind ceased and the snow stopped falling. At seven, the low sun came out from behind the storm and the forest stood white and sparkling in the silent drifts.

  Richmondena awoke with a chirp and knocked the snow piles from the grapevine stems. He flitted into the woods, chirped and called to his friends. He perched frequently in the thickets along the fence row. His tail flicked and spread with each call.

  The other songbirds awoke. Shortly after the full appearance of the sun they flew to the trees by the swamp and tried to find food. The snow was too deep even to bother to search the ground. They stayed in the tops of the trees where the snow clumps slipped and dropped from the twigs. They searched them hungrily for larvae.

  Sitta, the nuthatch, came out into the cold air and climbed his basswood rapidly. He moved swiftly to find food. He heard his mate call from the edge of the swamp and started off to meet her. He passed directly beneath Black Talon.

  Black Talon heard the wind in his wings and opened her eyes. She shook the last of the snow from her back and watched Sitta alight in a sugar maple. Black Talon was desperately hungry. It was no flight at all to Sitta’s perch. She eyed the nuthatch. The beech limb beside her groaned and cracked in the cold. Dry snow crystals floated in the air when she stirred. She breathed them in through her nostrils. They stung like bees. Black Talon relaxed over her eggs. She had not eaten for two days, but she would not leave. During the cold weather she would not hunt. But she needed food, for it was the fuel she must have to keep heat going to the eggs. Her hunger was so great that it hurt. It filled her with a savage fury, but she did not fly. She stayed fast through the morning and into the afternoon.

  There was a throaty “whoo” from the next tree. There stood Bubo with a fox squirrel in his talons. He had started hunting at the first letup in the storm. When the light had awakened the woodland he was still searching. He hunted through the morning. Twice he had struck at a cock pheasant, but each time the wary cock had run into the dense thickets before Bubo could reach him. In his eagerness he was not waiting until the cock was in the open. He perched above the thickets waiting for the pheasant to emerge, when a fox squirrel came down the fence row, turned, and made a dash into the cornfield. Bubo hurtled from his perch and hit the squirrel with driving force. He ate part of it at a nearby stump and carried the rest to Black Talon. Black Talon did not get up to come for the food. Bubo carried it to the edge of the nest and laid it before her. She arose to her heels and no higher so that the soft warm feathers of her pantaloons hung over the eggs. In this position she gripped the food and tore off a piece with the sharp hook of her upper mandible. The rest she swallowed whole. That night she cast the fur and bones in a pellet.

  All through February it was intensely cold. Black Talon rarely left the nest. Bubo did the hunting for both of them. He worked long and hard, for the snow still lay deep on the land and it was not easy to find food for two adult owls.

  He cruised his territory trying to locate portions of it where the food would be easy to take. He circled over a field he had not hunted before. It was a field in which shocks of corn still stood. In the center of the field was an old shag-bark hickory. He alighted on a limb and studied this promising-looking area.

  Vulpes, the red fox, came into the field. Bubo watched him trot to a shock of corn, circle it, then dig furiously and wedge his way into it. Several mice ran out the other side. Vulpes backed out of the shock, looked to see if he had stirred up any game, saw a vole, and plunged after it. Bubo was already upon another. He took it back to the hickory and devoured it. Vulpes trotted to another shock. It was banked with snow and frozen hard. The fox could not dig his way into it. He strode toward a third. Bubo watched him thrust his head and shoulders among the stalks. Two mice ran out. Vulpes caught one, but the other reached a burrow before Bubo could strike. He flew out over the field, however, to see if other mice were running away from the fox. None was moving. He bent the primaries of his left wing against the wind and circled back to the hickory. As he came toward the tree he saw the silhouette of another horned owl perched close to the bole of the hickory. Bubo’s black feathers over his eyes lowered, his white throat patch thumped. He climbed above the tree. Then he dived. For a moment the other owl stood his ground. However, as Bubo’s talons swung out and his beak snapped, the strange owl jumped onto his wings and swooped away to the north.

  Bubo flew into the hickory and boomed. The strange owl flew on. A few minutes later he arrived at his own woodlot and boomed back. The two owls agreed on the boundary. The woodlot belonged to the stranger, the field to Bubo. There need be no cause for conflict or battle if each bird stayed on his own territory. This fine sense of possession ha
d evolved through millions of years. Occasionally there were fights, but generally a hoot or a threat was enough to halt trespassers.

  With the matter of this boundary settled, Bubo went on with his hunting, using Vulpes as his partner. He returned several times to the crooked beech with an offering for Black Talon.

  Gradually the air warmed. By noon the snow in the forest was melting and running down the ravines into the stream. At night the land froze again. The old sugarmaple trees felt the ice slip out of the earth at noon and their roots responded to the change. The water moved up them cell by cell changing into sugar-rich sap. And beneath Black Talon the owlets developing within the shells gave their first cheeps.

  One morning in early March, Black Talon heard the stamping of horses and the jingle of their bells at the sugarhouse. She heard the door squeak as it opened and a voice call from the clearing:

  “Might as well start taking out the buckets, Irving. The sap’s running.” Frank Crag, the farm owner, watched the sap run down the spile he had just plugged into a maple tree. Irving, the hired man, came over with a bucket and hung it over the spile. There was a plup, plup, plup as the sap dripped into the empty pail. The maple sirup run was on.

  All that afternoon the farmers hauled buckets through the forest on the horse-drawn goose. They began at the west end of the forest and worked eastward. At the base of each maple they threw from one to five buckets depending on the size of the tree.

  The men came closer to the crooked beech. Black Talon became uneasy. The buckets clanged and banged onto the earth. She settled closer to the eggs. Her ear tufts stood erect as she listened to the bells on the horses jangling louder and louder.

  Irving shouted an order to the horses as he threw four buckets under one of the bigger maples. The horses pranced forward, jingling toward the crooked beech. One of the team slipped, caught himself, and pulled past the owl tree with a snort. The heavy goose bumped over the flaring roots of the tree, and a stack of buckets clattered and jangled to the ground.

  This was too much for Black Talon. She sprang from the nest and flew toward the elms that grew along the creek.

  “The big owls are back!” Irving shouted, as he watched Black Talon flap away. “One just left this tree. Must have a nest up there.”

  “I thought they were around, I heard them hootin’,” Frank answered. “You know, my father said there’ve been big owls in this woods ever since he was a boy.” They looked at the nest of sticks and twigs high in the tree, then drove the team on up the hill toward the sugarhouse.

  The ever-vigilant Corvus, the crow, saw Black Talon wing into the stream forest. The short-necked silhouette aroused him into cawing pursuit. His companions heard him, and once again crows gathered from field and forest to gang the owl. Black Talon alighted in a windfall along the creek. The crows swarmed around her. She hardly noticed them. Her one motivation was to return to the unsheltered eggs.

  Corvus was in the middle of a raucous caw when something like a thought went through his small bird brain. The call died in his throat and he jumped into the air and flew hastily to the sugar bush. Once there he did not know why he had come. He flew from tree to tree in great agitation. Then he saw the crooked beech and he knew his mission. He flew to the tree and looked down at the unguarded eggs of the great horned owl. Stealthily he slipped toward them, limb by limb. At the edge of the nest he stopped. His friends were still pestering Black Talon and although they were not as vocal as they had been, he knew by the pitch of their cries that the owl was still in the windfall. He cocked his head, then made two powerful stabs with his beak. He quickly flew away. In the nest a spot of warm blood stained each pierced egg.

  Black Talon heard the men and horses to the east of the crooked beech and returned to her nest immediately. She had not been away long, the eggs were still warm. She stepped softly into the nest and covered them with her body. An hour later she reached down to turn them. She was disturbed to hear no cheeps within the shells. She stood up to look at them, and as she did she felt a slight tackiness against her breast. This was not right. She rolled them over and settled down on them once more. They felt smooth and firm. Briefly she was reassured.

  Just before dark Bubo came to the beech with a red squirrel. He called to Black Talon, and she flew to the limb where he sat. She devoured the food and winged back to her eggs. The freeze of the February night had set in and she would not leave them long. As she opened her breast feathers to them, she reached down to turn them once again. They did not turn easily, but stuck to the sticks of the nest. Again she felt there was something wrong. She prodded them with her beak a second time. A piece of shell pulled off on one of the sticks and the egg turned. She looked at the fragment and then at her egg. Her heart beat rapidly and her breath came fast, as she realized that the owlets were dead within the shells.

  Black Talon remained with them another week. The hatching date came and went. No owlets emerged. Still she stayed with them, but each day the incubation rhythm and urge were weaker. Finally a tired owl left the nest one March night. She did not return. The breeding cycle had gone too far when it was broken and she did not try to renest. She took up the wandering life of the huntress owl.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  BUBO AND BLACK TALON moved away from the ancient forest during the sirup run and found roosts in the trees around the slough. Otus, the screech owl and his mate, Asio, stayed in the sugarbush, but shifted to a hollow in a beech stub along the fence line. Here they were not frightened by the men emptying the flowing buckets.

  Hardly had the great horned owls departed from the forest than the red-shouldered hawks arrived from the south. During the day the piercing “kee-yu, kee-yu, kee-yu” of this buteo sounded through the woodland. Circling high over the forest, the male called out the boundaries of his territory to all other red-shouldered hawks. For three years he had done this on his return to the forest. As he flew and called he looked down on the remains of the three nests that he and his mate had used.

  In the forest, a songbird cocked his head sideways and watched him soar. Parus, the titmouse, warned his troop that the buteo was back, but went on with his feeding. The red-shouldered hawk was primarily a mouser and a hunter of snakes and frogs. Rarely did he take the woodland birds. His hunting ranges were the marsh and abandoned meadows just north of the big woods. The hawk called over the woods for an hour or so then winged north to his hunting grounds.

  In the forest, Parus took up the heralding of spring. “Pe-toe, pe-toe,” he sang softly and sweetly. He was in a tree above the sugarhouse, his gray feathers looking sleek and trim in the sunlight. His mate listened as she perched on a branch of the fence-line hawthorn. A bold young male winged in and sat near her. From the treetop came the anger call of Parus, “gnad, gnad, gnad, chee, chee, chee, chee,” as he ordered the young male away. The warning was followed by an attack as Parus flew down to defend his mate.

  Several yards away a mourning dove sat quietly on a low broad fork of the basswood tree in which Sitta roosted. She was a little smaller than the wild pigeons that once filled the skies of North America. The sun fell on her pinkish brown plumage as she waited for her mate. She was nervous. She had come from the south two weeks ago and had been attracted to this territory by the melodious voice of the male. She had stayed to be his mate only to discover a week later that Bubo hunted their territory. Fear of him made her life an agony, but it was too late to leave. Already she had selected the basswood for her nest, and the cycle could not be stopped. Presently her mate, who looked just like her, came to her across the fields. The white tips of his tail feathers formed a flashing V as he flew. He gave her a dried apple twig and she pushed it under her breast. This was the beginning of the flimsy platform that would be their nest. They worked on it all morning, and when they had finished, it looked like a handful of sticks and grass tossed into the crotch of the tree. It was not a well-made nest, but the broad limb was a good support and the nesting material would keep the eggs from rolling off. T
he doves flew off toward a telephone wire at the road. In the open the swift-flying doves had little to fear. But each time they went back to the woods they were on guard for Bubo.

  Numerous birds had returned to the forest, but in the barren March fields only a few were back. One of these was the hardy Eremophila, the horned lark. He and his mate had returned when the countryside still spoke of winter. While the winds howled cold and bitter and snow flurries whitened the fields, they selected their nesting site. It was behind a little tuft of grass that sheltered the female from the wind while she worked. She dug a cup in the earth and skillfully lined it with grasses. In front of it she built a patio with small flat pieces of clay. She laid her eggs and incubated them. As she sat on her three eggs she seemed to be part of the earth. Even the keen eyes of Circus, the marsh hawk, who cruised above the field, saw nothing to attack.

  Nearby, Eremophila creaked his song of love. Then climbed into the air, pausing every few strokes to spread his wings, fan his tail, and sing to her. He would drop a few feet, pull on his wings, and climb higher. Finally he was a mere speck in the sky, but his mate still heard his thrilling song. High in the air the lark turned and faced earthward, folded his wings, and plunged down. Seconds later he was back on the fence post. This was the sky dance of the lark, an ancient ritual that had its roots in the Old World, and still tied Eremophila to the true larks of Europe, even though his ancestors had come to the New World thousands of years ago.

  While Eremophila was resting, a flock of robins migrating north passed overhead. Eremophila sprang from his perch and followed them. He had hardly gone a hundred feet before his neighbor lark warned him not to come any farther with a “chee-zit.” A second after he warned him, the neighbor appeared. Eremophila was trespassing.