The Barred Owl Didn’t Show Up to Be Photographed

Part of the Our Creek House series, and the start of a run about the habitat itself: who else lives on this property, and what it takes to keep them here.

We were sitting on the deck after a Saturday spent in the garden, both of us that kind of tired where there’s dirt under your fingernails and your hands smell like mulch and hose water and your back is letting you know you did real work. We were just there, out enjoying the late evening light, doing the good kind of nothing. Then Zach tapped my arm and whispered, “Look. In the tulip tree about two-thirds of the way up.”

And there he or she was.

A barred owl, settled on a branch, completely unbothered by us being twenty yards away with cocktails. We’ve known we have a pair on the property for a while (you don’t miss a barred owl conversation at three in the morning – they’re chatty), but seeing one out in the open in daylight is different from hearing them call each other across the woods at night. This was a visit.

I grabbed for my phone because the Nikon was inside and the moment was now. Let me say this clearly so we can move past it: these are not photographs I’d submit anywhere. They’re phone shots, taken with a great deal of digital zoom on a Pixel 8 Pro through a tangle of leaves and branches, into mottled evening light. I know what good owl photography looks like, and this isn’t it. The Nikon would have eaten this scene alive but, sadly, the Nikon was not here and the owl was there. You use what you use or don’t take any picture at all.

I took the picture. Twenty of them, actually. He stayed for almost ten minutes.

He was preening. Methodical, a little fussy, working through the back feathers and then ruffling everything out in a full-body shake that left him looking, briefly, like a feather duster with opinions.

That’s the thing about barred owls up close: the chest barring is wild. Horizontal bars across the upper chest transitioning to vertical streaks down the belly, like someone changed their mind halfway through the design. And dark, dark eyes. Most owls have yellow eyes; barred owls are one of the few dark-eyed exceptions.

Then he was gone, in that silent barred owl way. One moment present, next moment a movement of branches and absence.

That was on a Saturday. The Tuesday following, full dark, around nine, I was on the deck again and heard a call I didn’t recognize. A high, thin, rising “whee-eee,” somewhere in the woods toward the creek. Not a whinny, not a trill, not anything I could match to the screech owls I’ve been planning a nest box for.

I couldn’t quite catch it on the Cornell phone app and so I went down a small rabbit hole online. Mourning dove? They don’t usually call at night. Chuck-will’s-widow? Wrong call entirely; those are unmistakable. Saw-whet owl? Wrong range, wrong season. I started thinking maybe it was a juvenile begging call from one of the regulars. Cornell’s All About Birds website finally set me right. It was the barred owl. Not the famous “who-cooks-for-you-all” hooting that everyone knows, but one of the other calls in their repertoire (and boy do barred owls have a repertoire). They cackle, they monkey-house, they do this rising whistle that sounds like nothing else. When pairs are interacting in spring, they get downright weird with it.

So Saturday’s owl was very likely Tuesday’s owl. Or a mate.

This is one of the quiet pleasures of paying attention to a piece of land; the cast of characters reveals itself slowly. You don’t get the whole roster on day one. You get a glimpse, then a call, then weeks later a connection between the two, and suddenly you understand that the thing you saw on a branch and the thing you heard from the dark woods were the same neighbor.

The barred owl pair is just the headliner. The full guest list at this property is genuinely something.

The red-tailed hawks (including juveniles) keep a territory on the other side of the berm, or across the creek in the undeveloped land. I see them riding thermals over the back of the property, doing that high, lazy spiral that says “I have nowhere I need to be and everything below me knows it.” A pair of mallards, male and female, spend a lot of time in the creek. A great blue heron works the creek edges. Between us, Zach and I have phone photos of all of them, which is a theme around here.

Then there are the feeders and that’s a whole cast and crew that will get their own post in the future.

And, then, briefly, we had a bald eagle pair. It was a confirmed sighting and a brief nesting attempt that the state actually came out to log and monitor. Then the crows drove them off. Crows almost always win these confrontations, which seems wrong somehow when you’re picturing an eagle, but a mob of crows can make life genuinely miserable for a raptor, and the eagles eventually decided this particular piece of real estate wasn’t worth the harassment. I haven’t seen them in over a year now.

Here’s what I keep coming back to, on the deck in the dark, listening: this is not a yard. This is habitat. The mature hardwoods, the creek, the undeveloped land beyond the berm, the messy edges where tangled understory meets clearing: that’s why the barred owls stay. That’s why the hawks raise juveniles within sight of my deck. That’s why the heron knows to check the creek. We didn’t build this; we inherited it, and the best thing we can do is not screw it up. Keep the hardwoods standing. Don’t tidy the brushy edges into nothing. Leave the dead snags where the woodpeckers want them. Plan the screech owl nest box carefully, knowing now that the barreds are confirmed neighbors, which complicates things, because barreds will eat screech owls given the chance, and the box has to be sited where a barred can’t get a clean approach.

You make these decisions on a deck, in the dark, after hearing a call you almost mistook for something else. You make them with imperfect phone photos on your camera roll and a cocktail in your hand and the awareness that you’re one of many residents here, not the most important one.

I’ll get the Nikon out next time. Probably. From now on it lives by the back door, and it comes out to the table when we’re on the deck, because the whole reason I missed the clean shot is that the camera was in the wrong room. But I’m also okay knowing that some of the best things that happen on this property are going to happen when I have the wrong camera, or no camera, or no time to do anything but look. The owl didn’t show up to be photographed. He showed up to preen.

The pictures are a souvenir of the evening.

P.S. Yes, I know the Nikon Zfc exists, and yes, it’s my lust camera, purely because it looks like it wandered out of 1978 and I’m powerless against a good retro dial. Here’s the problem: as a former professional photographer, I already own more cameras than I know what to do with in civilian life. Do I really need another one? (Don’t answer that.) The Z5 doesn’t have charming dials and doesn’t care about my feelings. It just works. It stays.

P.P.S. The wren has not read this post and will absolutely square up with me again next March, same beams, same squawking, same watering can. I’ve made my peace with it. She has not.

P.P.P.S. I give that suet cage two more seasons, tops, before the pileated wins outright. When it finally comes down in a heap, y’all will be the first to know. Probably on a Friday.