Night Noise

"Hunting Moon"

limited edition 8 color serigraph (screen print)

© Bruce A. Morrison

The nights are getting shorter and the days are lengthening; it's still uphill to spring but there are many signs on the horizon!  Now, I'm not really ready for spring yet in the studio...sounds a bit off, but I just have too much work ahead here and studio work is much more productive when spring chores don't get in the way.  I need to make the best of winter yet I'm afraid!

But there are signs of spring never-the-less; we have nesting here in the valley now.  I haven't "witnessed" the nesting, but still know it's going on.  Each night for weeks we've been hearing the valley pair of Great Horned Owls vocalizing in the "neighborhood".  But in recent weeks it has accelerated to hours on end of "love talk" right here in the yard around the house.

I really do not know which bird has the deeper voice, but suspect it is the female, which is the larger bird by a good margin in the bird of prey world.  The other night (and morning) both birds sat around the house here really talking it up...sounding even excited.  Both bird's voices were overlapping one another, kind of like when two people are talking excitedly at the same time.  Around 1:30 a.m. I got up to try and get some audio recording of this banter, only to find out my recorder's battery was dead and the adapter and other battery was out in the studio!  Rats!  Oh well, just listening was fun enough...drifting in and out of sleep for the next 5 hours with the deep, wild rooted serenade outside the windows was pleasant to Georgie and I.

Great Horned Owls nest in late January/early February here.  It's still cold here, in fact I believe the last week of January and the first week of February are statistically our coldest time of winter.  Night time temps below zero Fahrenheit don't seem to matter!  These are tough birds!

I've written about these birds before on past blogs, in fact the blog image this time is from a cropped image I posted 3 years back.  There is some mystic about owls for me and many other people...it's likely the secret lives they lead in the dark I suppose.

It's snowing out fairly good right now and we'll be contending with this storm system for the next day or so...we're definitely in the middle of the winter season now.  But somewhere out there the Waterman Creek valley Great Horned Owls are nesting.