A snowy owl has no more business in this little corner of Missouri than Michele Bachmann has in a presidential race, so I was initially doubtful. Unlike this writer, snowy owls thrive in seriously cold places (think “inside the Arctic Circle); while it can be cold in the winter here, it never gets much below minus 20. Snowy owls like it a little cooler, from what I gather.
How the bird managed to find her (I THINK it was a “her”) way down here to my neighbors’ rooftop will likely remain a mystery to me, given what I’ve managed to find online so far. No migratory maps I’ve come across show them venturing much farther south than southern Minnesota or maybe northern Iowa, quite a ways north of where I hang my hat (or would, if I ever wore a hat). She was clearly lost.
Have to give her credit, though, for making the best of her situation. She perched very patiently on that rooftop for at least an hour, probably a good deal longer, yet she obviously never lost sight of the need to hunt, the need to survive--this breed of owl apparently will pick some high ground and settle there, scanning the country around it, for as long as it takes until it spies a potential lunch and goes immediately, hungrily after it.
In the spirit of Thanksgiving, I am thankful for having the chance to see the bird, so far from where it “belongs;” I am thankful that I have neighbors thoughtful enough to call me and let me know the bird was there; I am thankful that there was still a little room left on the SD card in my camera to allow me to photograph it.
Come to think about it, I am thankful for so many moments.
When I was about 10, it was coming up to the lip of a ditch crossing our farm and seeing a red fox (rare then, rarer still now) lapping at the ice far below me. Around the same time, it was driving to a grocery store and being startled by a deer leaping across the street in front of us, right in the middle of town.
A year or two later, it was making my way around a pile of brush in some woods separating two ponds I used to fish, and coming face-to-face with a mama skunk and two or three or more of her babies--I froze, didn’t stop to count, just backed off and ran away, but I can still see the skunk and her brood in my mind’s eye, my memory.
Much later, it was the possum lumbering in its odd, almost hunchbacked way toward me on a dark walking path early one morning, and the hawk with whom I came face-to-face when going out on a smoke break in the middle of midtown Kansas City; the hawk was resting in a tree at the edge of the parking garage, I was on the second floor, just about at eye level.
There were the baby raccoons, four or five of them, huddled 15 or 20 feet up against a tree trunk in streetlight, around 4:30 a.m. when I was engaged in my morning walk.
The humongous river otter that appeared one morning in a pond near my house, a long way from the nearest river (the Mississippi, actually).
The enormous beaver that waddled into the headlights, down by “Goose Pond” (not its actual name) in Kansas City North one night when we drove down there just on a lark.
I won’t even mention the rattlesnake stretched out on a rock, a squirrel in its mouth (well, I guess I did just mention that).
The world can be full of unexpected wonders, if we are open to them.
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