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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.”
A wonderful surprise: the last time I saw Mike Wilson was in 2021 when he built and installed the box that our backyard owls are currently living in.
On Sunday he stopped by to gift me one of his new “shabby chic” designs. His reclaimed wood supply dried up and cedar prices are through the roof, so he makes these (slightly bigger) boxes with pine, paints them, and goes at them with sandpaper when he’s done.
Our first box was #833. Two years ago, he told me his goal was to get well past #1000. Our new one is #1059, so he’s obviously been ripping it. (He showed me an amazing Google Map of all the boxes he has installed around town.)
All I had to give him in return was one of these Coconut woodcuts and a copy of Keep Going. (If I’d have known him when I wrote that book, he’d probably have been in the book as a case study.)
If you’re in Central Texas and you want him to build you an owl box, text him at 512-940-1161.
Here are some blind contour drawings of the two owls that are living in the box in the backyard.
A while back, I bought a cheap Gosky spotting scope with a smartphone adapter that let me take photos with my old iPhone SE. I keep it on the desk in my studio pointed at the box, but up until a week or so ago, I had to go out there to take photos manually or run the phone’s timelapse function.
Tonight’s ? ? footage really has it all: a ? visit, grooming, and flights #coconuttheowl pic.twitter.com/qkjmAppkCg
— Austin Kleon (@austinkleon) February 1, 2023
It occurred to me what I really needed was a 24/7 stream of the box. That led me to AlfredCamera, an iOS app that turns your old iPhone into a security camera. It’s a little buggy, and the image quality isn’t the best, but having 24/7 coverage with motion sensing and a low-light filter and the ability to play back footage has meant that I’ve gotten to witness all sorts of owl behavior I wouldn’t get to see otherwise.
The most adorable moments are when they’re perched in the box side-by-side, getting ready for their night of murder. Watching them try to squeeze into the opening is a great source of comedy:
Watching these two try to share the box at night is quite the comedy
? ? pic.twitter.com/iuLmb5r57K
— Austin Kleon (@austinkleon) January 31, 2023
As for whether they stick around or not, we’ll just have to see.
If they do stick around, they often mate by the end of the month. Mama will lay eggs in March, at which point Papa will move about 14-20 feet away from the box to keep an eye on things. Once the owlets hatch, Papa will move closer, about 7-10 feet away, and in June the owlets will fledge.
You can see owl updates on Twitter or in my Instagram stories.
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