The Snowy Owl of Ballard

Snowy owls silently swept south into Seattle again this winter.

(c) Pat Gaines/Creative Commons

On whispering white wings, the owls beat their way from the Arctic tundra in search of food, their flight muffled by feathery fringes that dampen sound. Here they perch on roofs and in trees, at airports and on beaches, keeping their counsel.

One of these owls has taken up residence in Ballard near Sunset Hill Park, a small patch of green with a sweeping view of Puget Sound and the Olympics. She perches in a tall Douglas-fir on some days, atop chimneys or roof slopes on others.

From this commanding position, she employs the "sit and wait" hunting technique of her kind, surveying her realm for the slightest movement of possible prey.

"She" has been identified as most likely being a young female due to the extensive dark-brown markings in her plumage. Young snowies are more heavily barred and spotted than older owls in general, but immature males tend to have paler markings than females and more of a white bib; females' brown markings can also be so dark as to appear black. According to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, "any Snowy that looks nearly black and white is probably a female."

(c) Claire Thornburgh, used with kind permission

(Yes, Harry Potter fans, that means that Harry's owl Hedwig, at least in the movies, was actually a male [really three males, named Gizmo, Ook, and Sprout]. It's the males that grow up to have pure white plumage faintly marked with brown. The female owl, however, is bigger.)

Last year, I never got to see the owls who landed in Seattle as part of a nationwide irruption of snowies (an irruption that resulted in a snowy owl showing up in Hawaii for the first time ever).

I wasn't going to miss my chance this year, so I made sure to pop over to Sunset Hill Park several times.

I finally got lucky on one of those visits after learning that the thing to do was not to visit the park and look for an owl, but rather to drive up the street and look for the gaggle of people with telescopes and camera lenses aimed at the owl and join them.

That's when I saw her in all her chiaroscuro splendor, sitting calmly in an evergreen, dozing. Her closed eyes curved like crescent moons, making her look as if she were enjoying a quiet laugh. Occasionally she stirred and her eyes winked open, revealing the yellow full-moons behind her lids as she swiftly swiveled her head.

Irruptions of snowy owls typically occur every few years in response to cyclical fluctuations of lemming populations in the Arctic. If snowy owls had school cafeterias, lemmings would be their tater tots. These rodents form the bulk of their diet, and it's estimated that a typical snowy eats about 1,600 of them a year.

In lean years, when lemming populations are down (a result of lemmings gobbling up all the vegetation in boom years and then having to pay the piper, ecologically speaking), immature snowy owls are crowded off the  hunting grounds by older, dominant owls who claim the available territory. Hence the younger owls' nomadic forays into other climes.

Snowies aren't limited to lemmings, so they're not fussed about eating other foods in lemming-less lands. On the tundra, they also catch arctic hares, mice, ptarmigan, waterfowl, and even fish. (Indeed, its Swedish name is Harfang, which means "the owl that catches hares.") Elsewhere, they can subsist on a diet of ducks, gulls, rabbits, crows, rats, moles, and squirrels. They're not above scavenging roadkill, either.

(c) Petr Kratochvil/Public Domain Photos

Despite their size (about 2 feet long, with a 5-foot wingspan and a weight of up to 6 pounds), snowy owls move quickly--and the crows that sometimes mob Seattle's visitors are advised to keep their distance even from an owl that appears to be fast asleep. The 1936 tome Birds of America notes in its entry on the snowy owl that if a crow comes too close, "the ghost suddenly launches out on strong, silent wings, the great talons strike and close, and there is a Crow who would have been the wiser but for the circumstance that he is very dead."


The appearance of these ghostly birds far south of their usual winter range is nothing new. Native American peoples were familiar with the arrival of snowies and had their own speculations about why the white owls appeared. According to a  January 1965 article in The Milwaukee Journal about the deadly Blizzard of 1886, survivors of that storm recalled the "omen of the snowy owls. All through a warm autumn they came, ghosting through fog to roost in tall cottonwoods along the river. Indians warned settlers to expect bad weather, but few paid attention."

John James Audubon, writing more than a century before Alaska became part of the United States, knew about snowy owl irruption, too. He pointed out that "This beautiful bird is merely a winter visitor of the United States, where it is seldom seen before the month of November, and whence it retires as early as the beginning of February." He himself saw snowies in Kentucky and Ohio and notes that others popped up in Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

An 1887 "Cyclopedia of Natural History" recounts the circumpolar species' irruptions overseas. Snowy owls there are known for "occasionally straggling in winter to the British Islands, various parts of Central Europe, South Siberia, Mongolia."

The book's author was aware of North American irruptions, too, commenting that "Sometimes there is a large flight of them along the seacoast, so much of a one indeed that the fact is duly heralded in the local newspapers." In this respect, neither the owls' behavior nor that of newspapers has changed one whit.

Fortunately (despite the shooting of the wayward bird that landed in Hawaii), the snowy owls' reception has changed, thanks to laws that protect our native birds. Writing in the 1920s, naturalist William Dawson lamented that during an irruption "No opportunity is ever lost of killing one of these handsome midwinter visitors; and one might suppose, from the number of specimens which adorn store windows and taxidermists' shops, that the bird is much more common than it really is."

(c) Claire Thornburgh, used with kind permission

Sighting a snowy owl is not the only reward for visiting the Sunset Hill Park on a crunchy, cold, clear-sky winter day. The day I stopped by, I also saw an Anna's hummingbird buzzing in a bare treetop farther down the slope.

Few places, I imagine, offer a chance to see one of the world's smallest birds--a subtropical species that's expanded its winter range northward thanks to an abundance of feeders and nectar-rich exotic garden plants--with one of the world's largest owls, who's migrated southward from a land of ice and snow and not quite enough lemmings.

The hummingbirds are already starting their courtship and will soon be nesting. Some will be feeding nestlings by the end of February, by which time the snowies will have headed back to the tundra to start their own families.

Cold Nights, Hot Dishes, & One New Recipe a Week

Temperatures have dipped below freezing for the past few days. The car locks are frozen solid in the morning. Every leaf and grass blade is fringed with white. The Anna's hummingbird who rules the side garden perches in the bare plum tree, waiting for me to blow-dry the frozen sugar-water-filled feeder so he can have his breakfast.

These are fine days to stay inside and make good on a New Year's resolution to cook at least one new recipe each week.

The kitchen shelves creak under the weight of yards of cookbooks and bins of recipes clipped from magazines even though, week in, week out, I tend to plonk down the same routine of pasta and sauce, meatloaf, macaroni and cheese, hastily tossed-together stir-fries, and roasted chicken with rice and broccoli.

Not that it's a bad routine, but those cookbooks are looking sort of resentful and making me feel kind of guilty.

So: the first week of 2013's new recipe was...roasted chicken.

But not just the usual "throw in oven, turn up heat, cook til done" roasted chicken I usually make. I took the time to brine two chickens and roast them according to the instructions in the America's Test Kitchen Family Cookbook.

The friends we'd invited for dinner brought the side dishes (spinach salad, couscous with cranberries).

Having guests--a rather rare event, sad to say--inspired the try-out of a second new recipe: a dessert of Apple Bundt Cake, taken from the pages of Bundt Cake Bliss by Susanna Short. Served with powdered sugar and a dollop of fresh whipped cream on top, it tasted what like living inside an apple tart might be like. Which I mean to sound like a good thing.

This week's freezing weather has been offset by roasting pork loin, again using the brine-and-roast method from the Family Cookbook, which yields a succulent roast that cozies up nicely with red cabbage, egg noodles, and peas.

Sadly, there's no bundt cake to round out this meal. After all, there's that other pesky New Year's resolution--the one having to do with getting in shape--to uphold.

First Bird of the Year, 2013

Much better birders than I were probably up before dawn on New Year's Day, tallying birds for the Audubon Christmas Bird Count.

Seven a.m. on the first day of 2013 found me savoring the first cup of coffee of the year, loitering before opening the curtains for fear that the first bird I'd see this year would be one of the house (English) sparrows that have been mobbing the feeders this winter, doing their best (and failing) to keep other birds away.

My concern about the first bird I'd see is due to the "first bird of the year" game enjoyed by many birders (and non-birders). It's based on the idea that the first bird you see on January 1 is the species that becomes your theme for the upcoming year.

I don't vehemently despise house sparrows, despite their status as a non-native invasive species with a well-earned reputation for ousting native species from their homes and killing their young. (Though I would certainly despise particular individuals of this species if they messed with any chickadees, wrens, or other native birds nesting in our yard, and would do my best to thwart their sparrow-sized attempts at home invasions.)

But I didn't really cherish the notion of this pugnacious, unloved bird of the monotonous song being my first bird of 2013. So, being a clever sort of person after a hit or two of coffee, I decided not to open the dining-room curtains first, as that window overlooks the feeders, and instead open the kitchen curtains first, as that window looks into the feeder-less backyard. Brilliant, n'est-ce pas?


The first bird immediately came into view, along with a dozen or so of its comrades: American robins, voraciously devouring all the orange berries on the cotoneaster bush. Robins, of course, are daytime birds, so they wouldn't have been up til midnight carousing on New Year's Eve. Instead, it looked as if they were having their New Year's party shortly after sun-up. (Robins have even been known to become somewhat tipsy after gorging on fermented fruit, but the ones in my garden appeared to be businesslike teetotalers.)

Robins are famous harbingers of spring, but these revelers weren't heralding an early end to winter. The American robin is what's known as a "facultative migrant"--they typically migrate only short distances and usually only as far as they need to go to find food or avoid really bad weather.

In some places, such as the Puget Sound region, robins stay put year-round. Winter is generally kind here, and there's an abundance of fruit and berries to sustain them until spring brings a banquet of worms and insects.

Seattle Audubon's "Birdweb" site notes, however, that "most often the birds that breed in Washington migrate south and are replaced for the winter by birds that nest farther north." So I don't know if these birds are the same ones who'll be caroling in the neighborhood in April.

So what might a robin augur for the next year? If I'd seen a European robin, there'd probably be a cornucopia of superstition to draw from (and a load of birders tramping into my yard to view this wayward bird).

The European  robin (at right, below) is a completely different species, which American colonists had in mind when they named the red-breasted bird they encountered on this side of the pond. Europe's "Robin Redbreast" carries a heavy load of myth, legend, and lore on its 20-gram back.

A lot of this has been innocently transferred to the American robin by people unaware that the two "robins" aren't related. This made me wonder if American robins figure in Native American folklore.

Diamonddavej at en.wikipedia

A quick Google search reveals that they certainly do, and that the topic is much better served by digging into books; what's available online barely even hints at the role the robin plays and what it signifies, and it's all mixed up with a new-age dreaminess.

However, the scrim of information online is enough to suggest that robins in Indian lore were portents of spring, with songs created to delight humans.

The robin's pleasing nature is revealed in a story that suggests its rusty color is the legacy of a robin burned while fanning a dying campfire with his wings to save the lives of a boy and his father. (Interestingly, the European robin is also said to have earned his red breast by fanning the fire burning low in the stable where Jesus was born--though another tale has it that the red is a bloodstain the bird picked up as it kept a vigil on the cross, singing all the while.)

Well, it'll be another year before I post anything about the robin if I wait until I can get those books via interlibrary loan, so for now I'll gladly settle for anticipating a year of good fortune and joy. Any bird whose song is often rendered in field guides as cheer up, cheer up, cheerily has got to be a symbol of good things to come.

Soul, Stitched

It is a good thing that I do not have the job of Helios, whose task it was to cart the sun across the sky. Because I was supposed to write this on the Solstice.

And so cosmologically I would still be hitching up the horses, cursing because I mislaid this bit or that bridle, and y'all would still be in the dark and waiting for the shortest day of the year (getting shorter every second) to be over.

So Merry Christmas, everyone.

Anyway.

Despite dire predictions of Earth's demise based on misreadings of Mayan calendars, December 21 did something fairly unusual for the first day of winter in the Northwest: It was clear, bright, and sunny.

Here's proof, toward the end of the day looking east toward the Cascades. (Sorry about all the wires. I didn't put them there. It's how we do electricity in the U.S. of A.)

More sunshine arrived in the form of a box of citrus fruits sent by our friend S., straight from the Sunshine State of Florida.

You don't need me to tell you all about the symbolism of light and dark and all the northern-hemisphere cultural traditions surrounding Solstice--there is probably more information on the Internet, both true and false, about its history as well as its intertwining with Christmas than you could ever read about even on the longest day of the year. Probably nearly as much information as there are video clips about cats.

(This makes me think of an ambitious essay I wrote when I was in middle-school English entitled something like "Light as a Symbol in Shakespeare." A topic that I apparently thought I'd covered completely and tied up neatly with a bow in just three handwritten pages. I suppose I tackled "Doves as a Symbol in Christianity" next.)

But the whole rebirth-perseverance-light-amid-darkness aspect of the Solstice can certainly make one think. By "one" of course I mean "me" as well as Lots of Other People. I think about how this beautiful Christmas season, which was once nothing but unconditional joy for me, is now threaded with sadness and loss (as it would be for all but the very young, and even that feels specious, in the wake of the massacre of innocents in Sandy Hook just a week ago). And how even more important it becomes to look for the light, the sparks of hope, now and in every season, every day.

Solstice this year, in the space of two hours spent with friends, felt like life compressed; good food, laughter, and sharing, pierced by a friend's announcement of very bad news as well as some very good news. Sometime during the day is when the play on words "soul, stitched" came into my head.

from Coffetypes info.com

The phrase wouldn't leave me, all day, and I thought, oh, great.This stupid pun on "Solstice" is going to be stuck in my head, and it's going to insert itself into the title of this theme, and then it's going to work like flypaper, and be stuck all over with little tied-up fly-sized parcels of pseudo-insightful wisdom about the soul and stitches, and it will be as if it all naturally evolved and not at all as if I went out and forcibly captured and killed the flies to purposely stick them onto the flypaper.

But actually it doesn't feel tidy, smug, and wise at all. It did make me think about how stitches hurt, but also help heal an injury; how you can be in stitches of laughter, a commingling of joy and pain; how stitches hold things together even as they pierce the very fabric they're binding. My soul, which I usually avoid thinking about, seems to feel its stitches more and more.

And just like my compact, well-intentioned, but naive Shakespearean essay, these scraps are all I've got: "The Symbolism of Light and Dark, Pain and Renewal in the Human Experience," All in One Middle-School Paper!

In less eye-rolling moments, I think, well, maybe the play on words is more like a magnet than flypaper. Back to middle school again, this time to science class, where we put magnets under paper and then sprinkled iron filings on the paper and watched as the little black specks arranged themselves in patterns around the magnet. Stick the words down, and the ideas arrange themselves. Uh-oh, here comes my sophomore-college-year English professor with his fine-point Sharpie; he's going to write "Your paragraphs are like shopping bags full of metaphors" on my paper again.

Well, best wishes for lots of light in the year ahead. Perhaps the egg I cracked open on Friday while baking cookies is a good omen for that--it was a double-yolker, the first I've ever found.

Like so many so-called omens, the double-yolked egg is an omelette of superstitions: It signifies good luck! No, bad luck! No, impending marriage or the birth of twins, either one being good or bad luck depending on your point of view! No, it means a death in the family! No way, it means a financial windfall!
 
Ah, duality--gotta love/hate it. I say the double yolk on a rare sunny Solstice day in Seattle means good luck.

Hippos, Hippos Hooray! It's Horse Goddess Epona's Day

Considering how much time, money, energy, and interest goes into everything horse around this house, it's rather astonishing that somehow it slipped right past us that December 18 is the feast day of Epona, the Celtic goddess of horses. (Thanks to author Susanna Forrest's blog for alerting us; we can always use another holiday.)

Epona (which means "divine mare" in an old Celtic language) was the protector of horses, donkeys, and mules as well as their riders and grooms.

She was also a fertility goddess (corn and foals are part of the symbolism in her statues, so this fertility seems to include agricultural bounty).

Unlike other Celtic icons, she found her way into the mythology of the Roman Empire and was granted December 18 as her feast day, continuing her equine stewardship by protecting the Roman cavalry as well as stables.

"Worship  me."

Why December 18 was selected seems to be a bit of an unknown. Her day of honor falls during Saturnalia, an approximately week-long festival celebrated by the ancient Romans beginning on Saturn's feast day, December 17. (She's bracketed by Saturn's wife on December 19, so she kept some pretty high-falutin' company.)

It's also close to the winter solstice, December 21. I will leave it to far more mystical types than me to make any connections they wish.

It seems an odd date on which to celebrate anything horsy, as nature intends for foals to be born in spring (and mares would naturally mate not long after their birth), so you'd think Epona wouldn't have much to do at that time of year. She'd hardly be blessing the clipping of a horse's winter coat or chipping away at frozen water buckets with a hoofpick.

Interestingly, though, the season surrounding the solstice (the ancient influence of which is reflected in the way we celebrate winter holidays with feasting, abundance, and light during this dark time in the northern hemisphere) is harnessed to a few other equine associations.

Saint Nicholas, for example, rides a white horse when he sweeps into the Netherlands in winter. On the eve of December 6, children leave out straw and carrots for this steed.

In Holland, Saint Nicholas rides his horse through the air; this animal leaps from roof to roof on the eve of December 6 so that the saint can climb down the chimney into the house (clearly the inspiration for the American Santa Claus, who needs eight reindeer to pull off this trick).

In Greece, horses and oxen enjoy a day of rest on December 18, as it's the feast day of St. Modesto, a patron saint of farmers.

December 26 marks the Christian saint's day for St. Stephen, patron saint of horses; in England and Ireland this day is a big one for horse racing, while in Austria horses receive a blessing.

"Hi, kiddies." (image courtesy Wikicommons)

In Wales, the post-Christmas season was traditionally marked by visits from the Mari Lwyd ("gray mare"), a creature represented by a horse's skull affixed to a pole, which was carried by a man hidden beneath a white cloth. The jaw was wired so the skull could open and shut its mouth to snap at people when it visited homes and pubs with its entourage, who engaged in singing, banter, and verbal one-upmanship in the hope of earning treats.

So...what does one do to celebrate Eponalia, if one doesn't happen to have a handy pony skull on a stick?

Offerings are always appropriate for Goddesses, so it's suggested that you leave out horsy treats such as apples and beer for Epona. (Beer? But of course. It's made from a grain, after all, and horses love their grain. Just ask Black Beauty in his eponymous film: "Oats! Wonderful oats!" And Irish trainers have long added Guinness stout to their horses' meals.)

Then feed a carrot to your friendly neighborhood horse. Lacking that, eat the carrot yourself and count out the date by stamping your foot 18 times.

Every Tree's the Best Tree Ever

We usually fetch our Christmas tree from a forest of firs set up in the lot of a fruit and vegetable stand near our house. But this year, we decided to venture out of the city and visit a u-cut tree farm, and make a day of it by stopping at a quaint place to have lunch.

I don't know how that devolved into eating Chinese noodles in the food court of the local mall, seeing "Lincoln," and then picking out a tree in a lot just across town. Oh well. It was still a lovely day.

 And it's a lovely tree. Funny how every year, the tree we pick out is The Best One We've Ever Had.

The chosen tree swooshes through the baler.

It's carried home atop the car, Romney-style.

  

Ruh-roh. A bit too tall. Another scrape added to the ceiling.

A great thrift-store find: vintage ornament hooks--the only kind that work.

To Pebble and Django, the tree is just a glorified water fountain.

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there are no words

My heart is sick with grief after today's terrible, terrible incident in America. Those children, those poor families. I'm just going to share pictures snapped on recent walks of things that are innocent and sweet, things those poor babies would have liked. Shattered otherwise.