Cat and Owl

In my reading I came across this link to a site called Bored Panda, where we find out that there are such things as "Owl Cafes."  And surprising animal friendships.

This cafe is in Japan, where we see a couple of fast friends:

Fuku the owlet and Marimo the kitten are an adorable pair of best friends that love to hang out, play together and nap at their home in Hukulou coffee shop in Osaka, Japan. The cafe occasionally gets other owl visitors as well, and it also sells fun owl-themed crafts and good, but it looks like these two are the stars of the show.

Owl cafes are becoming more and more popular in Japan and around the world – we’ve written about other cafes and bars in Tokyo and London as well. If you go to an owl cafe, please be sure that they’ve done everything they can to ensure the owls’ comfort and safety before giving them your business!

Naturally I was inspired to document a similar phenomenon right here on my own front porch:

[image credit Gary]

Well, if it's not a real owl, at least an owl statue!  And Tizzy the calico kitty is certainly real.

Owls...and Ultrarunning

Of all the critters Ive seen over the years along trails and roads, surely the most fascinating has been the owl.

Perhaps because they are quite elusive, I just have a fascination with this bird family, and have blogged about owls before at Mister Tristan (the blog, not the 6 year old human being) here and here.

Image credit Gary

This owl statue above, among several which grace our humble property, is our latest acquisition and marks the occasion of our 40th anniversary in August.  It is a beast of a carved river stone, standing about 24" high, and is just past the limit of what I can lift in terms of weight.  I had help loading it and was able to let it down from the seat in my minivan to the ground...barely.  Thence I wheeled it around the yard on a hand dolly.

I hope to run down on the C+O Canal here in a few days and would like nothing more than to repeat the owl experience I had there in which I stopped to pee at a tree--unbeknownst to me--that just happened to have a pair of large owls resting in it.  They, of course, took off and I was treated to a rare sight.

One final owl tale.  A couple of weeks ago, the bride and I attended an evening owl walk at Renfrew Park in nearby Waynesboro, PA.  The leader gave us a talk first, then we headed out into the woods where she played owl calls to try to lure in a live owl.  Things were simply not happening that night--perhaps due to a persistent wind--until all of a sudden a tiny screech owl showed up in response to the recorded call.

This owl landed nearly directly above the bride's head, only some 20' away, and oblivious to the 30 some people standing quietly there in the dark, proceeded to answer the recorded call.  The screech owl has an array of calls, and this one sounded most like a horse's whinny.

Wow!  So if you ever get a chance to go on a naturalist-led owl walk, by all means do it.

Heartwarming Owl Story...and Ultrarunning

Image credit here.

Some of my regular reads are a few blogs that loosely could be categorized as feminist blogs, to include Echidne of the Snakes.  Miss Echidne picked up a cool story from Finland about an owl and a kayaker:

Pentti Taskinen, a 61-year-old experienced kayaker, was out on Tuusula lake and saw something splashing in the water, through a thick mist. When he got closer, he found that it was an owl, swimming, exhausted, near death. Owls are not water fowl. How that owl got into the water is a mystery. Some bird watchers think it got lost in the fog, others suggest crows which sometimes chase owls away as a group.

The animal had initially tried to swim away, but apparently soon realized that the kayak which appeared from nowhere might be its last chance. Water reached in all directions half a kilometer and its temperature was six degrees Celsius.

The owl started struggling towards Taskinen's kayak and tried to get into it, but was unable to do so on its own.

"What was fine was when I got it into the kayak and took a couple of pictures. It then crawled near me and put its head inside my life vest."

And there it remained. According to the Taskinen the owl was otherwise calm, but shook nervelessly. He suspects that the bird would not have survived much longer in the water.

Taskinen sought the nearest inhabited shore, the owl was given heat, shelter and food, and it flew away the following morning.

And that, my friends, is your feel-good story of the day.

I may have told here my favorite personal owl story, but here goes.  I was running on the C+O Canal, along the Potomac River a few miles upstream of Williamsport, MD (the finish line of November's JFK 50 Miler).  I needed to pee, so I just stopped at a convenient tree just off the edge of the towpath.

While in the middle of going, all of a sudden I hear a commotion directly above me--it was a pair of owls hurriedly leaving the tree I was peeing on.  Of all the trees in the forest, I pick the one with a pair of owls in it!  And they were big, and majestic: I am not sure of the species, but it definitely was one of the larger species in our neck of the woods.

I felt at that moment that the gods of nature had indeed smiled upon me to grant me that experience.  Had I picked any other tree, I would have run past these owls, oblivious to their presence, as they quietly looked down on the passing runner.

Wesley the Owl—and Ultrarunning

 

I recently re-read a wonderful book, Wesley the Owl, by Stacey O’Brien. It’s a true story about a young researcher at Cal Tech, Stacey, who fosters an injured barn owl from infancy thru his ultimate passing at the ripe old owl age of 19. She writes lovingly and compellingly of her lifelong relationship with Wesley. It’s full of love, science, spiritualism, and is just a delightful and memorable book.

Photo credit here.

You should go read it.

Here’s one example of the science part. Although I have a couple degrees in Biology, I never quite understood the Northern Spotted Owl issue from the Pacific northwest. Sure, I knew that logging was threatening this owl and I—of course—was on the side of the owl, thinking that those who favored logging were shortsighted and uninformed. But here’s why (from page 164):

Biologists were warning the public that the old-growth forests, a delicate habitat that can’t be replaced, were disappearing at an alarming rate. The streams and rivers were silting and warming up, destroying the salmon runs and the entire ecosystem because of the runoff from clear-cut areas. The apex predator of these forests, the northern spotted owl, was endangered. When the apex predator is thriving, then so is the environment. But when the predator is faltering, biologists know that means the entire system is falling apart.

Most of the loggers didn’t understand the “canary in the coal mine” connection and thought the entire issue was about saving the owls, rather than their habitat. Because the loggers had been told to stop destroying the ancient forests before the forests were completely gone, they would lose their livelihoods sooner than if they kept cutting down trees until the entire ecosystem went extinct. Focusing only on their own livelihoods, they didn’t want to be told what to do, got angry, and took it out on the owls….

They didn’t understand—or they just chose not to—and they reminded me of the buffalo hunters of the nineteenth century determined to hunt down every last animal. They failed to see that they were going to have to find something else to do anyway after the last buffalo was gone.

We who run trails and treasure them can learn a lesson from this analogy. Our areas that are wild and free are a precious—and finite—resource. Nobody is making any more wilderness. So that’s why we must fight tooth and nail to preserve what we have, set aside more threatened areas, and ensure that encroachments from mineral rights, logging, etc., are not permitted.

 

This issue is particularly germane here in PA where unrestricted drilling for the gas of the Marcellus shale formation is looming large.

 

 

Wesley the Owl—and Ultrarunning

Life is interfering with blogging...this is a repost; originally ran on 8 Jul 2010.

Just completed a wonderful book, Wesley the Owl, by Stacey O’Brien. It’s a true story about a young researcher at Cal Tech, Stacey, who fosters an injured barn owl from infancy thru his ultimate passing at the ripe old owl age of 19. She writes lovingly and compellingly of her lifelong relationship with Wesley. It’s full of love, science, spiritualism, and is just a delightful and memorable book.

Photo credit here.

You should go read it.

Here’s one example of the science part. Although I have a couple degrees in Biology, I never quite understood the Northern Spotted Owl issue from the Pacific northwest. Sure, I knew that logging was threatening this owl and I—of course—was on the side of the owl, thinking that those who favored logging were shortsighted and uninformed. But here’s why (from page 164):

Biologists were warning the public that the old-growth forests, a delicate habitat that can’t be replaced, were disappearing at an alarming rate. The streams and rivers were silting and warming up, destroying the salmon runs and the entire ecosystem because of the runoff from clear-cut areas. The apex predator of these forests, the northern spotted owl, was endangered. When the apex predator is thriving, then so is the environment. But when the predator is faltering, biologists know that means the entire system is falling apart.

Most of the loggers didn’t understand the “canary in the coal mine” connection and thought the entire issue was about saving the owls, rather than their habitat. Because the loggers had been told to stop destroying the ancient forests before the forests were completely gone, they would lose their livelihoods sooner than if they kept cutting down trees until the entire ecosystem went extinct. Focusing only on their own livelihoods, they didn’t want to be told what to do, got angry, and took it out on the owls….

They didn’t understand—or they just chose not to—and they reminded me of the buffalo hunters of the nineteenth century determined to hunt down every last animal. They failed to see that they were going to have to find something else to do anyway after the last buffalo was gone.

We who run trails and treasure them can learn a lesson from this analogy. Our areas that are wild and free are a precious—and finite—resource. Nobody is making any more wilderness. So that’s why we must fight tooth and nail to preserve what we have, set aside more threatened areas, and ensure that encroachments from mineral rights, logging, etc., are not permitted.

 

 

Wesley the Owl—and Ultrarunning

Just completed a wonderful book, Wesley the Owl, by Stacey O’Brien. It’s a true story about a young researcher at Cal Tech, Stacey, who fosters an injured barn owl from infancy thru his ultimate passing at the ripe old owl age of 19. She writes lovingly and compellingly of her lifelong relationship with Wesley. It’s full of love, science, spiritualism, and is just a delightful and memorable book.

Photo credit here.

You should go read it.

Here’s one example of the science part. Although I have a couple degrees in Biology, I never quite understood the Northern Spotted Owl issue from the Pacific northwest. Sure, I knew that logging was threatening this owl and I—of course—was on the side of the owl, thinking that those who favored logging were shortsighted and uninformed. But here’s why (from page 164):

Biologists were warning the public that the old-growth forests, a delicate habitat that can’t be replaced, were disappearing at an alarming rate. The streams and rivers were silting and warming up, destroying the salmon runs and the entire ecosystem because of the runoff from clear-cut areas. The apex predator of these forests, the northern spotted owl, was endangered. When the apex predator is thriving, then so is the environment. But when the predator is faltering, biologists know that means the entire system is falling apart.

Most of the loggers didn’t understand the “canary in the coal mine” connection and thought the entire issue was about saving the owls, rather than their habitat. Because the loggers had been told to stop destroying the ancient forests before the forests were completely gone, they would lose their livelihoods sooner than if they kept cutting down trees until the entire ecosystem went extinct. Focusing only on their own livelihoods, they didn’t want to be told what to do, got angry, and took it out on the owls….

They didn’t understand—or they just chose not to—and they reminded me of the buffalo hunters of the nineteenth century determined to hunt down every last animal. They failed to see that they were going to have to find something else to do anyway after the last buffalo was gone.

We who run trails and treasure them can learn a lesson from this analogy. Our areas that are wild and free are a precious—and finite—resource. Nobody is making any more wilderness. So that’s why we must fight tooth and nail to preserve what we have, set aside more threatened areas, and ensure that encroachments from mineral rights, logging, etc., are not permitted.