\nSan Francisco Chronicle,\u00a0 USA\u00a0– Jun 9, 2007
\nLynette Evans
\nSaturday, June 9, 2007<\/p>\n
The juvenile barn owls are coming out of their house in the late dusk. Not yet ready to fly, they thrust their flat cat-faces out of the round entrance hole before emerging to strut up and down the perch, flapping their wings as their parents swoop overhead or perch atop the pole and on an adjacent wire, watching their almost fledging offspring.<\/p>\n
\nFor several weeks, we’ve heard the chicks rustling about in the owl house, 15 feet up the utility pole over the raised bed from which we were harvesting garlic and planting peppers, but the house seems too small for the birds to really stretch wings, which in the moonlight appear as large as those of their parents. Soon they will fly, but for now, they preen and stretch and make skittering sounds from 9 to 11. By midnight they are silent, back in their house, presumably asleep (I can’t tell about the latter because the parents moved in before we could install the remote camera in the house last winter).
\nSpring and early summer is the time for songbirds, too. By midsummer, the bird calls will be reduced to the rat-a-tat-tat of a woodpecker signaling its kin on the side of the utility pole and the soft cry of the mourning doves that indelibly link in my mind this farm in the dry heat of the San Joaquin Valley with the humid jungle that surrounded the Kona condo where we vacationed for so many years with my parents in their prime. I don’t know why there are mourning doves in places so distant in miles and climate — but they are here now, haunting my afternoon weeding sessions with memories of Hawaiian holidays long past.
\nAs usual, we’ve done the unthinkable — by our fastidious neighbors’ standards — and let the barn swallows nest under the eaves of the front porch. (It does no good to explain to a neighbor who complains about the mosquitoes that accompany warm weather that swallows and tree frogs and other animals that leave a mess also gulp down thousands of the pesky — not to mention risky — insects. I wonder what the neighbors will say when we put up the bat house I sent away for recently.) This spring a lone swallow has been resting nightly in the nest that we can see from inside the house, but no chicks have appeared yet. In past seasons she (or, given the short lifespan of birds in the wild, her other-year incarnation) has had a mate crowded in the mud nest alongside her, but not this year. We’re hoping she’s not waiting in vain for her brood.
\nE-mail Home&Garden Editor Lynette Evans at levans@sfchronicle.com.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
San Francisco Chronicle,\u00a0 USA\u00a0– Jun 9, 2007 Lynette Evans Saturday, June 9, 2007 The juvenile barn owls are coming out of their house in the late dusk. Not yet ready to fly, they thrust their flat cat-faces out of the round entrance hole before emerging to strut up and down the perch, flapping their wings […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[413],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\n