CONVERSATIONS WITH THE RESIDENT OWL

It is a special morning when I go out in the pre-dawn light to pick up my paper and the owl from the pine grove across the way greets me with it's brown velvet inquiry, "Whoo, whoo, whoo-ah."

Since the owl's muted accents doesn't awaken the sleeping dogs and no one else's day-beginning lights are on, I feel it is a greeting just for me. some mornings I just identify myself by giving my name, or if owl keeps insisting, I'll say, softly, "It is only your friend, owl." And I am a friend.

Barn owls, hoot owls or barred owls as they are sometimes called, and screech owls ar he only species I'm acquainted with.Vicariously, through the media, I'm becoming acquainted with the spotted owl of the northwest and its dilemma.

My first visual acquaintance with an owl of any kind was both the barn owl. One, or maybmale and female since they both help, made a haphazard nest in a dark corner of the high-up hay loft.

Grandpa discovered it first, but didn't tell us about it until the little owlets were out of the nest and trying their balance on the lofty rail that supported the transverse pulley ropes for lifting hay into the loft.

"It's best to go see them just before good dark," Grandpa advised, so after our chores were finished--milking our assigned cows, carrying in our quota of firewood, closing the chicken house door--Lou and I would climbthe ladder to the loft, then climb the staggered bales of hay which made a circuitous route to the specified corner

Never was the parent owl scared off by our appearance. We kept a quiet, respectful distance. Several times we were rewarded by seeing three owlets teetering on the hay lifting rope.

It was too thick for their as yet tiny claws to grasp securely so there was much uncoordinated seesawing. We didn't want to laugh and possibl scare them, but they resembled so much the acrobatics of monkeys we had once seen at a passing circus that it was hard to keep quiet.

If, miracuously, they all got balanced at once and remained still for a few seconds, they appeared to be curious gargoyles growing up out of the hemp rope, their fuzzy coverings just so much fraying of the rope.

Screech owls didn't come into my consciousness gradually. It was sudden and bone chilling. The first one I heard, I thought it to be my sister, Lou, caught in a steel trap I knew to be down by the creek that ran in front of our house. I'd heard a similar scream from her when, one summer day, she had looked down at her feet to see a coiled, ready-to-strike rattler, and again when

Britts' snorting, raging bull was charging after her, tai_l twisting, head swinging. She had escaped both. But now, a steel trap cutting through her ankle?

I went bursting into the lamp-lit kitchen, panting and disheveled and demanded breatheless "Where's Lou?"

"Right here," Lou said calmly. She was sitting at the big kitchen table starting her homework and eating popcorn.

Mama was the first to recognize my fear and got the halting and almost embarrassing confession out of me. She hugged me tight and smoothed my hair and assured me that it was only a screech owl. She had heard it too, coming up from the outside cellar.

As soon as I had calmed down I too started my homework. Although across from the table, Lou shoved her bowl of popcorn over and said, "Here."

Later, surreptitiously, I went to look again at the big Arm and Hammer bird chart on the kitchen wall and was somehow secretly pleased that the screech owl wasn't on it.

But I've forgiven it and actually smile when I hear one

now which isn't very often. They'd rather be out whe--e fieldmic where traipse the grassy meadows or/open-air corn cribs still decorate the barnyard scene. If I do hear one, I get hungry for popcorn.

REJOICE!