Owls Aren't That Smart

But they have uncanny powers.

- Rebecca Giggs

In the moments before seeing an owl comes a feeling like intuition. I will not forget one night when I stood on a balcony in suburban Sydney, and every wakeful creature in the surrounding bushland abruptly froze. Even the frogs seemed to want to renounce their noisy bodies. Who goes there? Seconds later, a powerful owl (the name of a species native to Australia) dropped onto the railing, and I, too, nearly leaped out of my skin. The owl was the size of a terrier, but languidly buoyant in the way of a day-old Mylar balloon, and to my ears silent. In the pin-drop quiet, it bounced along the balustrade. I never heard its talons touch the metal. The owl itself, I knew, had such sharp hearing that it could make out a possum's heart pounding beneath its fur. Unseen, a second owl-mate to the first, I presumed-loosed a deep, woodwind hoot that carried.

Owl calls often seem ghostlike or inchoate. A twofold sorcery: Owls can lead us to doubt our own faculties while drawing us to wonder at the mysteries of theirs. Of some 260 owl species at large in the night, at dusk, and less commonly during daylight, many are stealthily camouflaged and decked out with decibel-dampening feathers, their shrieks floating without clear origin. The young of some of those species have long been practicing. Great horned owls find their voice while they are still doubled over in the dark of their moon-shaped egg. Having punctured the small air cell inside the egg's membrane with their budding beak, the proto-owlets inflate their lungs and start chittering. To each its private void, in a confinement growing tighter the bigger they get. If a spectral sound is supposed to come from beyond the grave, what word might characterize the babble of embryonic life, the noises of beings too tenuous to out themselves from their shell?