The other day I stopped to see my friend Ralph. Ralph has an uncanny ability to find unusual things in unusual places. Over the years I have come to expect that he will have something new and unusual to show me each time I visit. It may be a perfectly good rake he found in the middle of a salt marsh, or a small lead weight that was sewn into the hem of a 19th century hoop skirt, or an 18th century shirt button found on the beach. One of his most unusual finds was on a trip to Oregon where, in an abandoned barn, he discovered five – yes, five – calliope hummingbirds that were caught in a large spider web! He is always surprised, and delighted, at these unexpected finds.
When I stopped to see him this time he went to his freezer and pulled out a foil-wrapped package about the size of an ear of corn. He unwrapped it and revealed the folded and slightly-squashed body of a saw-whet owl. It had a splotch of blood around its beak and tangled in the right side of its head feathers was a three-inch length of catbrier.
It is always an event to see a saw-whet, the smallest of Cape owls, and the most difficult to locate. In over fifty years on Cape Cod I have only seen three or four in the wild. Their preferred habitat is pine barrens, but with the reclamation of oak forests over the past century, their numbers have declined and are now mostly sighted on the Lower Cape.
Ralph told me that on a recent walk his dogs’ barking had led him to the owl. “I saw this little bird just hanging from a briar patch,” he said. “It was obviously alive and was reaching up with its claws trying to free itself from the briar. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t have any clippers or gloves with me, so I just reached in, and the damn bird sunk its talons into my hand. It hurt – bad! He may have had his beak in me, too. I didn’t know what to do. The owl was stuck to the briar, but stuck in me, too. I was yelling and the dogs were yapping. We might have all stayed there and died.
“I finally got my hand loose, and still didn’t know what to do. I got my pen knife out and grabbed the owl from behind its neck. I was cutting away a segment of briar and he was still struggling when – can you believe it? – he just upped and died! His yellow eyes just rolled up into their sockets and he just - expired! I don’t know, maybe he was injured, or just had a heart attack.”
Ralph put the frozen owl in my hand. It seemed heavier than I expected, but when he weighed it on his postal scale, it was less than three ounces. I was struck by the reddish dried-blood streaks on its breast, and by the contrast between the almost ethereal softness of its plumage and the black, hooked, steel points of its beak and talons. How had this diminutive predator come to such an unlikely grief? And when the wood mice saw it dangling from the thorns, did they dance to celebrate its mortal humiliation?
“But a saw-whet,” said Ralph. “Wouldn’t you know it? Why couldn’t it have been a great-horned, or a screech owl? Why is it always the rare ones that die? It’s like politicians – it seems it’s always the good ones who get assassinated: Lincoln, JFK, Bobby, Martin Luther King– and little hooty here.”
