Barn owls are one of those species with “global distribution,” where one could consider the barn owls of Europe to be the same species as the ones in Texas and Kinshasa and Kwangtung. Are they tho? I’m sure there are “cryptic” species hidden within that range, noteworthy subspecies, etc. They are the most visible members of their branch of owlkind, the Tytonidae. Tytonids are less likely to have feather “ears” than “true owl” strigids, and generally look like “shy guys” from mario brothers.
I’ve personally seen one in a zoo and one in the wild. I used to walk back and forth across Auburn in the middle of the night, often between two and four AM. Once – I think this was when I was living in the adjacent tiny town of Pacific – I was walking the Interurban Trail and saw a ghost white headless-looking thing float above the trail, from the trees on one side to the trees on the other. A fleeting glimpse, but enough to – in conjunction with range information – positively ID the suspect.
My dad used to know this shitty neonazi who dabbled in “vulture culture” before that term was coined. Barn owls are not infrequently hit by cars, and this dude randomly hit barn owls twice within a pretty short time on the exact same stretch of road. He preserved the bodies in some way, I don’t recall – skeletonizing or taxidermy, whatever. I never actually saw them. When this particular neonazi hadn’t fully turned but was beginning his descent, he gave my dad his Dead Kennedys tape, and that’s how I came to receive my first hardcore punk rock album, In God We Trust, Inc. (prior to this i only had dead milkmen CDs). I guess as the punk became nazi, he felt the need to fuck off.
When I was in junior high, we got to dissect owl pellets. Some may have come from barn owls; impossible for us to know. But it was super cool and interesting. I don’t normally like anything to do with excretions – piss, shit, vomit – but dry owl pellets seem rather sterile. Bleached white by stomach acid, they are little blocks of compressed fur and bone that came out the front end of the bird, so they didn’t have to waste digestive resources on the hard bits. Pick apart a little block of fur and find interesting tiny bones. The skulls of those rodents looked so cool to baby Bébé.
Anyway, being a massively successful species, they provide some hope to me for the biosphere. Whatever we do to this world, barn owls will probably pull through. Shine on, you funky ghosts. Keep eating rodents and puking up the cool parts. I’m down.
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