"How about the side grab?" Steve asks. He might be a dad boasting about the agility of his soccer-playing daughter. He isn't making the owl perform for our enjoyment. These flight skills are as natural to her as stepping over a crack in a sidewalk is for us. The mouse is barely out of his hand, scurrying in confusion on the tree trunk that rises beside me, when the owl swoops onto it, talons leading, and picks it off. It happens so fast that she's flying away by the time I realize she's grabbed the prey, killing it instantly in her grip. She flies up to a snag broken off 40 feet above the ground and tucks the mouse carefully into the jagged wood. This is a cache, not a nest. If she'd been delivering food to her young, the nest would be a natural platform high in a tree. She checks to be sure the mouse is well hidden. If she does have nestlings, she'll come back later for takeout.
The spotted owl research protocol demands that we spend an hour with the bird. She's had her limit of commercially raised albino mice, so now we sit to see what she does and if what she does will tell us whether she has a mate or nestlings. This suits my research protocol just fine. I'm here as part of the Long-Term Ecological Reflections project initiated by the writer and philosopher Kathleen Dean Moore, who works out of Oregon State University. Like many of the scientific experiments conducted in and around the Andrews forest, my humanistic assignment is part of a project intended to last 200 years. This timeframe was inspired by a hallmark study being conducted in the Andrews, the log decomposition study. Two hundred years is roughly the lifetime of the giant logs left to rot on the forest floor, and during that time successive teams of scientists will observe and measure the dead wood's contributions to forest regeneration. Writers are invited to visit several sites in the forest and to leave an account of their experience. The hope of this project is that by careful and sustained observation, a testimony on behalf of the forest will have kept it alive.
THE OWL DOESN'T MAKE A SOUND. She perches on a branch high above us. She is still. She watches us. She reaches her head forward -- "the pre-pounce lean," Steve calls it -- as if she has seen some prey on the ground. The song of a thrush flutters through the quiet, the auditory equivalent of seeing an orchid in the forest. Beauty is what I came here for, a beauty enhanced, not diminished, by science. If I had only my senses to work with, how much thinner would be the experience. What a record we might have of the world's hidden beauty if field scientists and poets routinely spent time in one another's company.
A young tree, broken and caught between two others, creaks to the rhythm of the wind. How well the owl must know this sound. Does she anticipate the crash of its falling? What is the consciousness of a spotted owl? There she perches perceiving us, and here we sit perceiving her. We exchange the long, slow, interspecies stare -- no fear, no threat, only the confusing mystery of the other. Steve knows her language well enough to speak a few words: the location call, a bark of aggression. Perhaps that means she thinks we are owls. We do not look like owls. But we do, briefly, behave like owls, catching and offering prey, being still, and turning our eyes to the forest.
"What are you?"
"What are you?"
That's the conversation we have with our eyes.
"What will you do next?"
"What will you do next?"
I keep falling into the owl's eyes. Then we stand up and hike down from that high place.
