By Chrissy McClarren
I have written an essay every week for one and a half years, and over that time, writing has become an important part of my life. Now, I am taking a short break. We are going on vacation to Point Pelee and Longpoint in Ontario, Canada, to commune with the birds. While I’m away, I hope you enjoy this fantastic essay from my friend and fellow bird lover, Chrissy McClarren.
A piece of macrame art hangs on the front door of my home, a two-foot lanky owl that sways back and forth like a pendulum each time I open and close that creaky wooden portal. I had attached the top and bottom of the owl to pieces of driftwood that scratch the paint on the door whenever it swings, but despite that, I leave my fraying and worn owl alone. That owl has come to embody more than I could have ever dreamt when I made it as a young teen in a desperate effort to keep crankiness at bay, while healing from a broken leg. I couldn’t have known then that a wild owl would become my gateway bird at age forty-four, the bird that led me enchanted and tiptoeing into the expansive world of avian wonders to become a lifelong bird lover. Most profoundly, I couldn’t have known that a special owl would help me accept a brutal death shortly before turning sixty this year.
The first week of spring, a telephone call seemed to mysteriously set in motion a most auspicious chain of events. A bird-watching friend called to chat and happened to reminisce about accidentally flushing twenty Short-eared Owls from a field at a nearby conservation area, as well as how amazing the experience of them flying around him had been. I spontaneously gushed, “I wish I’d flush a tree full of LONG-eared Owls.” He laughed and concurred with my wish. We both knew the chances of something like that happening were astronomical, as Long-eared Owls are elusive beauties that are rarely found these days, and not simply due to habitat loss - they are spectacularly secretive and exquisitely sensitive nocturnal birds – but I’d heard a story some years back that had inspired a deep belief in the possibility of magic when it came to these owls. It was probably the unconscious impetus behind my outrageous wish.
In the early 1980s, a friend had driven out to Busch Conservation Area to join a group that regularly met to watch birds. It was March. He was early. He decided to wander off on his own and explore the Comfort Pines area, which in those days was a well-known spot to look for owls. Not finding much, he returned to the road. Unsure of where he was, he began walking, turned a corner and realized he was going the wrong way. However, instead of heading back, he noticed a cluster of thirty-foot-tall cedar trees growing by the side of the road up ahead. As he approached them, he got within forty feet when it began to rain owls – and he came to a mesmerized halt.
The owls, startled by his presence, began moving, reacting, flushing, flying about, many returning, diving back into the tree. A number of them had not left the tree at all. As the birds settled down and he had a chance to take in what had just happened, he gazed at first at ten, then twenty, then thirty, maybe fifty or more Long-eared Owls hidden within the tree, snuggled tightly together on branches. He turned and walked slowly away, not wanting to flush any more of them. Returning to the group, he told them what he’d seen, but as preposterous as it was, no one believed him. Not one to press an issue, he participated in the morning’s planned activity, and after the group broke up, the group leader decided to accompany him back to the cedars, along with one other group participant. They started toward the tree, and it again rained owls. As they tried to regain their composure and attempt to count the birds, they realized it was literally impossible – it was too hard to see them all. Long-eared Owls often perch in groups in the winter, but these birds were side by side by side on every branch of the tree. He surmised that a flock migrating north to their breeding grounds must have stopped there that day, but was dumbfounded as to why they had packed into that one tree on the edge of the woods.
Dumbfounded is exactly how I felt when my whimsical wish for a tree full of Long-eared Owls came true the very next day after blurting it on the phone. When I received a text that some Long-eared Owls had just been discovered in a tree in a thicket at Riverlands Migratory Bird Sanctuary, only thirty-five minutes away from my home, I shook my head. ‘No way,’ I thought to myself. ‘Was this possible? Had I conjured a tree full of Long-eared Owls with my wish the night before? What am I doing still here?’ My husband was more than willing to drop everything, to immediately take off work and drive me to see them. Although I longed to do the driving myself, as I’m the speedster, I did not trust myself to get us there safely and reluctantly let him drive. Crossing my fingers on both hands, I wasn’t going to uncross them until we arrived and saw the owls. The entire drive there, I was frantic, sure others were going to flush them. When we arrived at the thicket and heard from a woman coming out of it that the owls were still there, we walked gingerly inside. The man who’d first found the owls that day beckoned us, describing which tree they were perched in.
Taking my first look at them through my binoculars, I released my still tightly crossed and very sore fingers. Relief flooded my body as I gazed reverently at them, then I gasped at the stunning view of them through a spotting scope. Three Long-eared Owls looked wide-eyed back at me. Astonishment hit me in waves as I told the man who’d discovered them about my wish, and he told me how he’d found them. He said he’d had to take a leak, but chose not to use the odoriferous pit toilets. Instead, he’d walked into the nearby thicket, and, voila, flushed the owls into the tree. Looking again through the scope, that’s when I noticed her. One of the owls was an unusual ethereal white – and her gaze was more alert and pointed than the sleepy eyes of the other two. She was small and slender and had the checkered bark-like pattern on her body like the other two, but was much paler. She had white feathers around her yellow eyes, instead of orangish feathers, which is more typical. Tall soft tufts stood erect on top of her head, looking like ears. She gazed at me with such intensity, I almost felt the need to look away, that I was being terribly naughty even glancing at her, but she compelled me with her ghostly charms. I wanted to get as close to her as she would allow, but I feared offending her and causing her to fly off if I walked closer; I didn’t want to violate the intimacy I was being afforded and decided to keep a lengthy distance.
Returning day after day to see her and her companions became a compulsive pilgrimage to a sacred site of worship. I was alarmed at how agitated I became if we talked of going anywhere else, even crying the day we tried to go to another refuge, and was only consoled when we turned around and headed in their direction. Haunted by her presence, I kept far back, until on the fourth and last visit, when a special friend encouraged me to get closer and led me to a different path into the thicket, promising me that the birds would not flush. Hesitant, I walked the path that she pointed out, shocked at how close it was to the owls, but I persisted, slowly, very slowly, until suddenly I felt like I was right in front of her, about twenty feet away. She was tiny, much smaller and more vulnerable than I’d imagined. I did not use my binoculars. To lift them to my eyes seemed invasive at that proximity. Overcome with awe, our eyes locked, and I suddenly recognized the eyes of my aunt, who’d died just days before.
On that day, I had held my mother in my arms as we wept, watching my aunt die at home of pancreatic cancer, the most painful of all cancers. She was my mom’s baby sister and best friend – and the woman who had spoiled me since I was a baby. After my aunt became bedbound and entered hospice, my mom wanted to visit her every day. I filled her room with sunflowers, and we poured through old family photos together; I handmade and hung a banner that said, “You are the miracle and joy in our lives, always and forever,” and gave her the foot massages she loved. We teased her, joked, hung on her every sassy word, words which became more and more infrequent. As she withered away, became jaundiced, and lost all desire for food and drink and engagement, our sense of powerlessness took its toll as she asked us repeatedly to end her life. Her four children did all they could by administering the allowed doses of morphine and anti-anxiety medication, but her suffering became more and more acute due to the neglect of the in-home hospice care company that was so understaffed that no one could be dispatched even on the day she died. That day, her coughing and choking spells were grisly, and the task of helping her through this, of figuring out what to do, was left to my gut-wrenched cousins. When she finally took her last breath, I left enraged and deeply disturbed that my last memory of my aunt was seeing her in excruciating distress.
I do not believe in supernatural phenomena as a rule, but for a few minutes, I suspended my disbelief and entertained the notion that what had compelled me to return over and over was that this specter of an owl was my aunt – and she was not going to leave this world with that horrific vision of her death left in my head. She was quite stubborn, after all. My compulsion could have been an instinctual need to heal from the trauma of the last days of her life, to release its stranglehold, but that would be a boring clinical way to view it, wouldn’t it? Again, I looked into the owl’s eyes and saw my aunt, having taken the form of this bold and glorious owl, waiting in purgatory here in this thicket, soon to be escorted to heaven by her two handsome companions, once this new vision of her was embedded in my thick skull. It was marvelous, imagining her this way. I walked out of that thicket joyous. Whether fact or fiction, owl or my aunt, it did not matter. All the earth was in hospice, and I knew we were going to need to learn some creative, even fantastical ways to survive. I thanked my friend profusely – and hugged her long and tight.
Wow, a beautiful and powerful essay that left me in tears.
I have had several surprising and extraordinary bird experiences after the death of a relative or close friend. A dear friend died 36 hours ago. I think I’ll choose to take this story as my birding link to her. (And I’ll keep my senses open tomorrow in case an actual bird does cross my path.) Enjoy your break dear Bill. Thanks so much for sharing this haunting story. So special.