Only one calling bird, but it's a doozy

 

I really should be sitting in my office right now, I thought as I scrambled along a muddy hillside in the rain, trying desperately to keep my camera dry while gusts of wind kept whipping my umbrella around. I should be back at work, quietly awaiting visits from my hordes of students who have papers due this week and may need a little last-minute advice. If I'd stayed on campus, I wouldn't have wet feet and muddy shoes! 

But I wouldn't have seen a snowy owl either, and that was definitely worth an adventure with rotten weather.

Word went out over the weekend that snowy owls had been spotted nearby, rare visitors to this area. I get a lot of these e-mail alerts from the local birding group, which is mostly made up of retired people with time on their hands;  they can squawk about cattle egrets 20 miles upriver all they want but if I'm in class, I'm not going anywhere--and if I do manage to scrape together enough daylight to drive to some remote area to look for a rare bird, it's bound to be gone before I get there. That's how I missed the unusual visitation of sandhill cranes a few years ago, and cattle egrets last weekend, and snowy owls yesterday.

But today I'm not teaching, merely holding office hours for students who seem universally uninterested in assistance on their final papers. I'll have a pile of grading later in the week but this morning I devoted a few hours to fiddling with next semester's syllabi, utterly uninterrupted.

So when the e-mail alert arrived telling me that a snowy owl was hanging out atop a light pole ten miles down the Interstate, I first rejoiced that I still had my camera in the office (because I'd used it yesterday to take pictures of a department event) and then grabbed the keys and hopped in the car. I didn't even leave a note on the door. What would it say? "Gone owling"?

The owl was exactly where the e-mail said it would be, just sitting on top of that lightpole as if it ruled the world. Getting close enough to take a decent photo was a problem, though, since I'm not stupid enough to stand in the middle of the Interstate with all those trucks zooming past at 70 miles an hour. Gray sky, limited light, cold rain, and sudden gusts of wind all combined to make the photography conditions less than ideal.

But the owl seemed unbothered. At first it looked motionless as a lump of dirty snow, but then its head swivelled my way and I knew I'd found a treasure. My first snowy owl in the wild! And it was a good thing I went when I did, because by the time I'd packed up my camera and turned my car around, the owl was gone.

Later in the week I'll be complaining about the pile of end-of-semester grading that will hound my every waking hour, keeping me tied to work all day and long into the night, but today I'm rejoicing over the rare combination of circumstances that allowed me to walk away in the middle of the day to visit a majestic bird. If any students complain that I wasn't in my office during office hours, I'll have to explain that sometimes there's nothing to do but answer when nature calls. (Even if you have to get your feet wet.)