Bubo, the Great Horned Owl (American Woodland Tales)

by Jean Craighead George

  It was afternoon. Melodia was brooding her tiny young. Suddenly she became as immobile as the earth clod by her nest. The garter snake was returning from the pasture. He slid up to the fence post, paused, then slipped down his route to a retreat under the cherry stump. Melodia waited. She remained motionless for a half hour before she flew off to join Melospiza. They fed in the hayfields together.

  Later in the afternoon, two more eggs hatched, and around noon the next day the fifth and last pipped and came out of its shell. Melospiza sang vigorously from his song perch on the fence post. Melodia kept the nestlings warm between trips to the pasture and hayfield for food. She tried to stuff the small birds into sleepy silence, so they would not attract the garter snake. She watched for him constantly. Away from the nest she chipped at the mice in the field, she watched for the low-ranging marsh hawk, and she listened for signals from her mate. Her day was frantic and busy.

  The next day the nestlings demanded many small feedings, especially the two largest of the five. They raised their heads higher than the others and ate more than the other three. Still they were not satisfied. These were the young cowbirds, vigorous, big, and hungry.

  The following morning Melodia awoke to find only four mouths reaching up to her. One of the little song sparrows had died during the night. He had not been able to reach as high as his stepbrothers and he had received almost no food. Melodia lifted him from the nest and carried him far out into the hayfield.

  The next busy weeks went by swiftly. The nestlings grew rapidly. One day while Melodia and Melospiza were gleaning the fields for food, one of the big cowbirds began stretching and wiggling around in the nest. His feathers covered his back and head, and his wings were dark with quill feathers. He fluttered, shoved, and twisted. A tiny song sparrow yielded to his movements, shifted toward the edge of the nest, and tumbled down the side into the grass. He hopped, rolled, and stumbled through the forest of grass stalks. As he went he called and called. He bumped into the fence post and rested. He called again. There was a stir in the grass along the fence. The garter snake was leaving his retreat beneath the cherry stump in search of food. He could not hear the chipping fledgling and slid by it, but downwind of him he tasted the scent of the bird with his tongue, turned back, and saw his prey. Melodia lost her second nestling.

  The three remaining birds stayed in the nest. They were still growing rapidly and took more and more food. The young cowbirds were almost half again as big as the little song sparrow who was now fighting for her life. She could not scream as loud nor reach as high as her stepbrothers. She was hungry all the time, and only when the bigger birds were stuffed so full they could swallow no more, did Melodia take the food and put it down the song sparrow’s throat. But she was hardy and managed to grow and develop in spite of the cowbirds.

  One day the garter snake passed the fence post as the song sparrows were being fed. He felt the vibration of the nestlings as they quivered and called. He turned and slithered toward the movement. Melodia saw him leave the fence post and come to the nest. She dived at him frantically, chipped, and cried. Melospiza winged in from the field and joined her in the attack. The snake came on. He had to hunt by scent now for the young birds had become motionless at the alarm cry of their parents. The snake wavered a moment at the foot of the dogwood, flashed out his tongue, turned, and moved directly toward the nest.

  As he arrived at the nest the warning calls of the two song sparrows reached a frenzied pitch. He took the smallest of the three nestlings. When he struck, a cowbird burst from the nest in fear and ran off through the grasses. He could not fly, but his legs were strong enough to take him many yards from the snake. He stopped at the edge of the marsh and waited in panic. There in the bent grasses he listened to his foster parents chip and beat their wings as they dived toward the reptile. They moved down the fence line crying above him as he returned to his cherry stump. Finally they stopped altogether. Then the fledgling called to them from the edge of the marsh. He called and called. Melospiza found him and presented him with a fly. That night the cowbird hopped as far up a raspberry stem as he was able. He grew cold during the darkness without the warmth of the little body of Melodia.

  Morning found him still alive. He moved into the warm sunlight when it finally reached the low branches of the raspberry. He called vigorously, and both Melodia and Melospiza brought him food.

  The next day the song sparrows were feeding him constantly. The snake had returned and taken his brother, and now he was the last of the five nestlings. The foster parents fed him until he could no longer swallow offerings.

  The next two days he stayed in the protection of the raspberry bush. On the third day he tried his wings. They carried him handily on a short flight to the edge of the oat field. All day he exercised his wings, taking short flights around the marsh while Melodia and Melospiza tried to keep track of him. Each time they returned with food they would call to him. He would answer from another shelter in the marsh. There, in the protection of dense grasses and leafy dogwoods, the tiny parents fed their big fledgling. They were a strange sight, for the cowbird was now bigger than they and ate constantly. There were other fledglings in the fields now, but Melodia and Melospiza knew their own, and they never fed the wrong bird.

  Presently the cowbird was flying around the hayfields and pastures with his song sparrow parents, and even when Melodia began to collect material for her second nest, he was accepting her food.

  When Melodia’s second clutch of eggs had hatched, the young cowbird was still on their territory. He stayed near the marsh, but occasionally flew to the permanent pasture to look for food. It was there that he met his own kind, as other young cowbirds raised by the cardinal and the towhee left their homes to hunt. They mixed with the adult cowbirds that came to the fields, and before long were flying with them to the edge of the woods. They squeaked and preened their feathers on the sunny limbs of the trees, while Ater and her female friends watched with keen eyes for the new nests of the song sparrows, the cardinals, the indigo buntings, and the field birds.

  In July the adult cowbirds left the farm to gather in large post-breeding flocks and only the young cowbirds were left on the farm. They formed flocks of their own. Through some mysterious guidance the young cowbirds, without any parental help, found that they were not song sparrows, not indigo buntings, not cardinals, not towhees, not red-eyed vireos, but cowbirds; and they took up their own way of life. Endowed with acute instinct, they knew what to do.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  IT WAS LATE SEPTEMBER. Parus, the titmouse, sat on the limb of a maple near the sugarhouse and watched the groups of tiny warblers gleaning the trees for the last insects of the season. The wood warblers had come during the night, having flown from the northern forests. In a few days they would be off to the south, hopping in long jumps of two to three hundred miles until they reached the lands of winter sunshine. They were part of a vast group of birds that migrated with the seasons. They needed insect food and went south to find it, following an ancient knowledge bred into them for so long that they obeyed it without reason. Parus and Bubo and Richmondena and Sitta and Otus belonged to another group, the group of resident birds that spent their lives in the space of a few acres.

  Parus had been hatched in a woodlot to the east. He was fledged in May, and he spent the remainder of the summer with his parents. In September he saw his parents for the last time and flew tree by tree, woodlot by woodlot, to an oak forest where he spent the winter. Here he accepted without quarrel the leadership of an old male titmouse. In the spring the old male drove him from the oaks and Parus moved to the big forest, where he won a place to live. That had been two years ago, and neither Parus nor Bicolor, his mate, had been more than a hundred yards from the sugarhouse since that time. In the spring Bicolor was the only titmouse he permitted on his territory, but in the winter he became more social and young birds shared his tract of land. During this time he ruled his territory like a monarch and every titmouse who join
ed him was subservient to him.

  Parus’s titmouse neighbors also took in young wandering birds in the winter, and so there were groups of titmice throughout the forest. Occasionally Parus would fight the neighboring males when they came to his territory, for he was an ambitious monarch and wanted to keep every inch of land that belonged to him. When a neighboring leader died, Parus would take some of the land from the young birds that remained. Consequently he acquired a territory larger than that of the other titmice during his two years in the forest.

  Parus’s friendship with Sitta, the nuthatch, was a pleasant one. They never fought, they never argued, and yet they shared much of the same area winter and summer. Sitta was not a titmouse, and Parus knew he was no threat to him. He rather enjoyed this acrobatic friend who added a touch of humor to Parus’s court. Sitta walked upside down on the tree limbs, scooted headfirst down the trunks, and went about his duties in an interesting defiant way.

  Other birds came to Parus’s territory in the winter, the hairy and downy woodpeckers and the tidy little chickadees. They recognized Parus as a very intelligent food finder and followed him to his secret spots. This was a very workable society, and the birds must have enjoyed the companionship of each other or they would not have lived so close together. As a group they were also a little safer. If Parus did not see the shadow of Bubo or Black Talon pass overhead, perhaps Sitta or a chickadee would. Their terrible fear of the great horned owls was more bearable when there were many eyes.

  Deep in the forest Bubo heard the warblers feeding with Parus. The big owl left the pine along the creek and steered his course through the trees to the sugarhouse. It was almost dark, the small birds were making their last preparations before going to bed. The owl could hear them twittering in the low bushes. His wings were silent as he pumped across the clearing. He stiffened his tail as he struck an updraft, extended his wings to catch the wind, and swept up to alight quietly on a limb of Sitta’s basswood tree.

  Parus was preening his breast feathers on a limb of the hawthorn. Suddenly he stopped, and without looking up cried his warning signal, “seeeeeee.” Although his head was down, he had seen the silhouette of the owl from the top focal point of his eye, and the pattern of the stubby head and broad wings released terror within him. He called his whistle of distress and froze on the limb where he was.

  His tiny heart beat several hundred times per minute and his eyes became rigid and glassy. There was not a chirp or a flutter among the birds of the sugarhouse community. The warblers were silent. The evening sounds of the titmice ceased. Sitta was as if nailed to the underside of a maple limb, watching the owl in his tree.

  Bubo stood erect in the basswood. His eyes peered intently from beneath the stiff feathers of his forehead. They were focused on Parus in the hawthorn bush. Parus did not even blink an eye. Bubo was certain that he was there and was waiting for a feather to twist in a breeze, or a nictitating membrane to wink across the bright eyes. With great patience, the owl waited for some movement to betray the life in the little gray stub on the hawthorn limb.

  Parus watched Bubo, enduring a fear that had been passed through generations and generations of titmice. Then he saw the great round face turn slowly away. The eyes came into focus on something about three feet from Parus. Felis, the house cat, had been lured to the sugarhouse by the melodies of the warblers. He had stepped around a corn shock as Bubo alighted in the basswood tree and he had not seen the owl. Although he heard the distress call of the titmouse, he had come to associate these calls with his own arrival in the forest. He crouched in a copse by the fence and settled himself to wait until his presence was forgotten. He knew the memories of the birds to be short. As he sat in his ragged splendor he smelled and saw Parus rigid on the twig of the hawthorn. He arose and stole forward. Not even the foxtail grasses trembled as he swung into the open to leap.

  Bubo saw him in the grass. He stretched his head up in a serpentine twist, then bobbed it down into the golden muff of neck feathers. His horns went up.

  The great tiger-bird dived earthward. His wings opened silently until they reached half-flex. Then Bubo pulled them swiftly to his body and he was diving earthward at seventy-five miles an hour. His feet swung down, his talons opened, and Bubo hit his prey. The power of his strike crushed his prey senselessly to the ground. Piercing talons clamped tight and the target relaxed in death. Parus, tensed to the breaking point, burst through the twigs of the hawthorn into the air. Several of his breast feathers clung to the thorns, and a broken flight feather dangled from his right wing.

  Bubo did not fly back to the basswood with his heavy prey. He flapped out into the clearing with it and looked up into the trees. The little birds came to life and the clearing was noisy with their clicks and chirps. Parus flitted up and up into a maple. At the top of the tree he was very much alive and courageously gave voice to a volley of tits and whistles. He flicked his tail and pecked at his broken wing feather.

  Bubo covered his prey with his wings and began his feast. Sitta slept in the open that night, for he was too frightened to return to his stub while the owl was in the clearing.

  Parus and his troop lived through many fearful incidents while the owls hunted their territory. Their fears were intense, but they were short-lived. When Bubo and Black Talon soared off, the songbirds forgot and returned to their duties with chip and vigor. In this manner the winter passed.

  “Who, WhooWhoo, whooo, whooo!” Deep in the creek forest Bubo called to Black Talon. It was early January and the first rhythm of spring had stirred the noble owl. Black Talon was dozing in an old pine near the marsh. She lifted her head and shook her feathers. Her beauty was that of the strong and the regal as she perched erect on the green pine branch. She listened to her mate call, then bobbed her head and slowly closed the feathered lids. Her white throat patch pumped beneath the strong hooked beak, but she did not answer.

  Again Black Talon was called to bring forth her young in the forest. And again, all of her enemies were stirred to bring about her defeat: the crows, the big buteos, the raccoons, and man.

  With the passing of each night Black Talon became more attentive to Bubo’s love song. One night she stopped mousing in the meadow to listen. The next night she flew a few trees closer to the golden tiger-bird, and at last she awoke early in the evening to await the thundering beauty of his song.

  Finally she winged through the forest looking at the cold empty nests of the hawks and crows. She came to the crooked beech. The shape of the limbs, the familiar sticks of the nest disturbed her. She struggled with a strange bird emotion, for something had happened to her here. She leaned down and wiped her beak on a limb of the crooked beech, lifted her wings, and stepped around in a circle. She looked out into the forest. Each tree was familiar and disturbing. She recognized one of her old flight routes, and, without thought, she sprang into the air and flapped her way along it. It led to the edge of the forest. She banked and swooped up into an elm. Here her nervous fears left her, and she hunted quietly for mice.

  Then Bubo called from a nearby maple. She answered, and the forest listened to them speak. Their voices were deep and drumming. When they had spoken their fill, Black Talon turned away from the field and flew into the forest. She observed as she cruised. In passing over the woodland slough, she saw the old nest of the Cooper’s hawk. She circled it, and noted its breadth, its shelter, and its height. She flew down to it, and stood on its edge. From the nest she surveyed the woods. It was difficult for her to see the ground. The nest would be hard to see from below. All around her was a latticework of tiny limbs. These would serve as some barrier to the crows. The nest was sturdy, deep, and broad. It would do.

  Black Talon called Bubo. He lifted his soft wings and left his perch. He flew to the edge of the slough and alighted near the nest. The two owls called until dawn. The rabbit in the vine tangle below shivered to hear them. At five in the morning Bubo began dancing and snapping his beak. Black Talon looked away. Bubo grew bold and flew to
a tree in the slough. He again began to dance and fluff his feathers. Black Talon opened her beak in a bird yawn. She flew off to sleep in her pine tree at the edge of the marsh. Bubo followed her.

  The next night they began their booming before the sun had set. On the far side of the forest, Parus, the titmouse, stopped his troop with a “seeeee.” He listened to the owls, then flew up the fence line to the sugarhouse. He went right to his cavity in the beech. There was no “all’s well” signal that night. Even Richmondena went quietly to his roost in the grapevine. The forest birds retired early, for the boom of Bubo was bolder this night, more resonant and more rapid.

  Black Talon permitted her mate to sit on a limb beside her, but she turned away as he bowed slowly to her. Bubo flew out a short distance, snapping his bill. He circled back and returned to the limb where Black Talon perched. He bowed again. Black Talon was larger than Bubo, she was more powerful and more ferocious, but Bubo’s dance of love seemingly made her as shy as a wood mouse. Her lids lowered and she moved one step away.

  At that moment a squirrel flicked his tail and darted up a tree to his leafy bed. Bubo sprang into the air. Tipping and bending his wing feathers, he darted in and out of the maze of tree branches. He snatched the squirrel from his tree, pulled deep on his right wing, circled, and came back to Black Talon. They devoured the food together.

  When they were fed until their crops puffed out like a pigeon’s, Bubo began to bow and dance again. Black Talon joined the nuptial ceremony, shaking her feathers and lifting each one until all of them stood gold and shimmering over her body. When each delicate feather was lifted to its full height, Black Talon was softer than a cloud. Even the stern brow over her eyes was like a border of lace.