The Late, Great Strix varia

Strix the harbinger

guards the life gate, asking all, 
Whooo will pass this night?

At 1410 we normally sleep with our ears to an open window. Often shortly before dawn when we are floating out of sleep and about to hit the morning shore, we are awaken suddenly by the hooting calls of the Oakwood Barred Owls calling back and forth between mates - “Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you-all?”, or the screeching challenges to that pair of owlish interlopers who live across the bay in Oakhurst.

This weekend word came down from the Oakwood children that there was a dead owl beneath the playpark swings. It was a Barred Owl, wings at its side, not a feather askew. Of course Lorna retrieved the deceased bird body, and of course she bagged it up and put it in the freezer (next to the ice cream bars) - which is technically illegal I suppose "collecting wildlife for the purpose of ... " and more than a little creepy. 

The feathers are destined to dropped off at the Root River Rod Company to be tied into fishing flies (Dunns or Cahills?) - another illegality I imagine.

How did it die? Likely by natural causes, but the theory I like best is that it inadvertently called out it's own name and stricken, fell from the tree, stone dead before it hit the ground. It would seem to be the only logical explanation.

Breaking laws left and right. 

Ask not for whom the owl calls; it hoots for thee. - Gunnar