Owl

I have a sad story about brave death.

A couple of years ago, on a sunny spring morning while driving down one of the dusty chert roads not far from our cabin, I saw a great horned owl caught in the barbed wire of a roadside fence. He might have been swooping in during the night to snatch a mouse at the edge of the road and got his wing caught on a barb in the wire.

It is almost certain he saw the wire. Owls have extraordinary eyesight, even on dark nights. He saw the wire, yes, but what would it have been to him but a small tree branch or twig that his wing would simply brush aside an instant before the kill?

How could the owl have been prepared for barbed wire? After the millions of years of evolution that built the owl and that refined his relationship with his environment, barbed wire entered his world only a moment ago. It is a danger utterly foreign to owls, and the mechanisms of owl behavior cannot recognize it.

I stopped the truck and backed up to the owl. He fluttered helplessly, hanging by one wing from the middle strand of the fence. A barb of the wire had snagged his wing at a joint, and it was obvious the wing was badly broken and twisted and beyond repair. The damage had occurred either at the moment when the owl struck the wire or later, as the consequence of the owl's thrashing during the night in his attempts to free himself.

Though weak from hours of struggle, the bird was startled by my approach into renewed exertion, the energy of his fight undiminished by what must have been terrible pain. But the wire held him, and his struggles only twisted his wing further.

Inextricably caught in the wire, his wing destroyed, weak and battered from futile struggle, there was no hope of the owl's regaining the ability to fly again and hunt and survive. I put on a pair of leather gloves I keep in the truck, and I wrapped the owl in my jacket, stilling him, so that I could remove him from the wire.

He never looked away from me.

His eyes were hot and fierce and defiant.

I left the owl with a neighbor, who shot the owl and buried him and who later told me that he cried when he did it, and I believe him.

But I would have preferred not to bury the owl. I would instead have lain him in a field, where he would have gone into a vulture. In the ground, the owl went into other animals, and it does not matter, but I would like for him to have become fuel for soaring.

I am transfixed by the shadowy calls of solitary owls in the dark of the forest at night, far distant and faint in the still, damp blackness.