Owl Talk

Photo: Phillip R. Brown
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/

 

We have Barred owls on our property in Connecticut where we spend the summer. I’ve only seen them once, although I’ve heard them many times. A couple of years ago while sitting on our back patio, I happened to be looking at a huge oak tree in our yard when I noticed a Barred owl on one of the branches. It was just perched there, among the leaves, looking very majestic. I was even more excited when I glanced a little to the left and saw another Barred owl, which I assume was the mate. I took a couple of photos with my iPhone, but the owls look way too small for me to post one of those pictures. I think the photo below does the Barred owl justice.

Owls like to talk at night, and I hear ours quite often. It’s always late – midnight, one in the morning, or around then. They have eerie but beautiful eight-syllable hoots, and they often talk back and forth, sometimes interrupting one another. Owls hoot to

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Rereading Books I Love

Euphoria is one of them. I’ve read it three times, and I think it haunts me more every time. Maybe I wish the words would magically rearrange themselves so the ending would be different. But then I probably wouldn’t be thinking about it long after reading it. Euphoria is loosely based on the life of anthropologist Margaret Mead. The author, Lily King, created a fictional account of what happens with three young anthropologists in Papau, New Guinea in the 1930s, when anthropology was a new discipline. The story involves Nell Stone, already the author of a best-selling book about natives of the Solomon Islands, her husband, Fen, who is jealous of Nell’s success and is desperate for his own, and Andrew Bankson, who has just failed a suicide attempt. Bankson, eager for companionship, convinces the Stones, who are about to leave New Guinea to return to Australia, that they should stay and that he will find them a new tribe to study. The novel is about their relationships, their work, their beliefs about the study of other cultures, and how all of

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