AUSTIN KLEON

We got to meet a screech owl!

Meg and I had an amazing morning yesterday out in Elgin at Austin Wildlife Rescue: we got to spend some time up close with Thurston, a 4-year-old eastern screech owl, just like the Coconuts who live in our back yard.

One thing you might notice is just how tiny Thurston is! The screech owls look larger than life through the spotting scope, but they’re just itty bitty raptors.

Here’s a comparison of our screech owls to the famous Flaco, the eagle owl now loose in Central Park:

What’s funny about this is that one reason I love looking at pictures of the magestic Flaco is that I recognize so many of the postures and behaviors I’ve seen from my little owls:

I don’t know why this pleases me so much, this juxtaposition of the grand Flaco with the more modest but still majestic Coconut. Finding majesty in the mundane is one of my favorite things, I guess. The little behavior the same as the big behavior. (And I think a lot about how photography scales — big and small scale to the same size on the phone screen.)

It’s like Hedda Sterne said: “For the sublime and the beautiful and the interesting, you don’t have to look far away. You have to know how to see.”