Tag Archives: owl

Beating the summer heat

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The unofficial start of summer kicks off with Memorial Day weekend, but where I live, we’ve already seen triple temperatures. Bleh. This no longer counts as springtime to me. Some of my friends love the hot weather. I do not. Though I was raised in a place of heat and humidity, summer is not my favorite season. It’s not even my second-favorite season. Life in California—with its cloudless days, searing heat, lack of shade, and rattlesnakes—has bumped summer down to my least favorite season.

As a runner, I find myself getting up earlier and earlier to dodge the baking sun and rising temps each morning. Yesterday, desperate to avoid a repeat of Monday’s too-hot, too-late-in-the-morning run, I found a handy tool that tells you when the sun will rise and set where you live. (Just for fun, I’ve set it to show times for Daphne, Alabama. You can type in your own city/town and see how it changes for today. Drag the daily line along to see how it will lengthen until June 21 and then begin to shorten. Type in a place south of the equator, and you’ll see the opposite effect.)

I’m not the only one trying to find ways to beat the heat. Western screech-owls have returned to nest in the box on our house, and a couple of evenings ago, I looked outside to see this:

A thirsty owl

An owl sat perched in the waterfall of our backyard koi pond. I didn’t want to scare it away, especially because the fish didn’t seem concerned about its presence. I grabbed the camera and took some shots from inside the house.

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The owl and the cat

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I promised an update on my owl post from a couple of weeks ago. You remember the owl, right?

Houseguest2015_3FT

We had a bit of drama the night of the post. My husband and I were cleaning up the kitchen, sorting through mail, doing the sorts of tasks we normally do at the end of the evening. Our dog, who had been asleep in the living room, all of a sudden went berserk by the window closest to the owl house.

I saw something moving on one of the window panes and flipped on an outside light to see what was happening. I realized it was the owl—clearly a juvenile out of its nest but unable to fly—clinging as if for dear life to one of the thin bars across the window. On the ground below, staring up at it, sat our next-door neighbor’s cat. Continue reading →