Cry, They Are Called

In old-growth forest, a more-than-human mythology finds refuge

If you want to meet the spotted owl, it turns out that you’re going to need a few mice.

Steve Ackers, the wildlife scientist who leads the owl demography study in the H. J. Andrews Experimental Forest in the Western Cascades, offered to take me on a daytime visit to one of the nesting sites he tracks. The project isn’t tracking every spotted owl in the region — although it probably gets close — but instead uses known nesting sites to sample the population. They’ve developed a statistical model for this; tallying the presence of birds at historic nesting sites from season to season, the study team maintains a working sense of owl population dynamics. The study, which has been running in the Andrews since the 1970s, helped to show that Strix occidentalis, the spotted owl, needs the complex ecology of old-growth forest to survive. This work fed the so-called Timber Wars of the 1990s, when bumper stickers implored lumber-industry advocates to “save a logger: eat a spotted owl,” and activists learned to climb into the forest canopy to save trees older than the Forest Service, older than the republic itself.

The Timber Wars have abated, but the owl demography study continues, now nearly fifty years on, tracking the evanescent presence of birds in forests facing threats that know no allotment boundaries or sale-tract numbers. And although the science of spotted owls helped preserve the last stands of old-growth Douglas-fir forest in the Cascades, the owls continue to struggle. In particular, they’re falling back before the encroachment of their more robust, garrulous cousins, the barred owls, who thrive in the fragmented ecosystems shaped by modern human activity. And the long-term effects of climate change on the spotted owl’s complex habitat are still unknown.

It’s a warm April afternoon, bright and breeze-lively, when Steve parks his white USDA truck on the shoulder of a logging road well up into the Lookout Creek drainage. We climb out and gear up: along with a backpack stuffed with extra layers, field notebook, compass, and water, Steve clips a nylon belt around his waist from which a T-angled joint of thick PVC pipe is hung. The ends of the pipe are stoppered in fine mesh, and I can see that a layer of floury wood chips rests within. Steve was skeptical about this gadget when it first appeared, he tells me, but it sure has proved its worth. So saying, he slides a plastic tub out of the back of the truck, and plucks mice from where they sit in their treadmills or lie curled in the litter. One by one, he drops six blinking, matchbox rodents into his pipe holster and slides the empty mouse box back into the truck.

Donning hardhats — mine in forest green, Steve’s a bright blaze orange—we start up-slope through the underbrush. Steve likes to avoid stepping on the older rotting logs, so as not to disturb the habitat. Knock off a big sheet of mossy bark, Steve worries, and there’ll be a newt; you try to pet the bark nicely back in place, but you know that for the newt, it won’t be the same. Up through rhododendron and vine maple, we log-straddle our way to the top of a rise, halting in a depression, the root cavity of a giant fallen Douglas-fir bridging off into the forest colonnade. The hole left by the fallen tree is softly mossed, constellated with luminous trefoils of Oxalis, crepuscular in the shade of the giant root mass and the slow, filtered forest light.

Steve starts a series of cunning vocalizations: the tight-lipped simulation of a rodent in distress, alternating with a hard-edged, four-note hoot. Between owl-hoots, Steve discourses on the mysteries of interspecies communication. His dissertation adviser, Constantine Slobodchikoff — Steve enunciates his former professor’s name with emphasis, as if still amused by the thorniness conjunction of syllables — long has searched the rudiments of language in the calls of animals. Working primarily with the Gunnison’s Prairie Dog , Slobodchikoff purported to demonstrate that the calls of these famously social rodents show such language aspects as displacement (reference to that which is not present) and productivity (inventing new calls for novel objects and situations). Steve says that, according to Slo-Bod-Chi-Koff, we should be able to find words in owl calls ; that if we could learn to parse them finely enough, we could distinguish calls of distress from calls for prey caching, for instance. But Steve is not so sure. He think something other than words is being produced.

“Ah, okay,” I say, struggling to imagine the twilit phenomenology of owl calls, wondering what strident idiom they might employ. “So they are more general-purpose, more flexible, than words?”

Steve shakes his head with a vexed uncertainty. He thinks that they’re just — different, he says. Something other than words. Not words at all.

Other than our words, however, we hear no cries for prey or mates; the forest still is pervaded with the silence of owls. Now, Steve withdraws a special tool from the hip-belt of his pack, a tiny translucent bauble, which turns out to be a squeaker excavated from a dog toy. He gives it a few squeezes. Soon there’s an urgent cry from across the slope: the cawing of a Steller’s Jay high in the canopy. What’s he warning us about? The answer appears as a shadow slicing through the midlevel of the canopy, cutting obliquely and zigzagging around the stems of the great trees. A rumor of owl.

There’s our bird, Steve says.

Our owl takes a few more soundless, soaring hops, bounding easily through the canopy, keeping its eyes fixed on us as we toil through the brush towards the likely nest site. The bird is bigger than I expected, though I know it likely weighs no more than two pounds. Owls evolved in the late Cretaceous, and everything about this bird — its bark-brown plumage, its splash-patterned back, its fringed and soundless primary feathers, and the great, sensory-gathering dish of its ruffed face — is fitted to fade away and then rush to sharpened encounter in dapple and dusk.

Steve deposits a white mouse on a thin bare branch about eye level. The mouse is only about five feet from me, and I worry that we’re too close. But Steve doesn’t back away, and so I stay put, too. The rodent wiggles its whiskers and whips its tail, balancing on the branch with an aspect of dull surprise. The owl’s black eyes have locked onto the albino comma of the mouse; now with a swoop it drops, levers the mouse way with its talons and, soundlessly beating its wings, turns to gain the heights of the forest.

Turning to check our position, the owl now ladders its way high into the canopy until it reaches the crook of a big branch, where it busies itself in the duff of needles and moss — caching its prey, Steve tells me. After a few minutes’ work, the owl returns to settle in a branch some twelve feet overhead, and commences to watch over us with gravity and intent. Each time I shift my weight or twitch, the owl’s gaze falls on me. And often, for long dappled seconds at a time, it settles its uncanny gaze into mine directly.

The bird we track today is a male, banded and known to the study, long familiar with this rodent ritual. Over the next hour, the owl takes five mice from Steve, caching four in various places throughout the stand before consuming the last. He never calls for a mate to join him. I learn why we donned hard hats: following a bird as it wheels and glides soundlessly from perch to perch, it’s easy to lose track of logs and limbs in the trajectories one’s head takes through the understory. We spend an hour with the owl, alternately crashing through the vine maple and standing still, setting out the mice at intervals, making our way up-slope toward a likely nesting site. But the bird, who has paired up and raised owlets in the past, seems alone this season. As we sit watching it in the branches above, the fierceness of its stare, the intensity of attention, the acuity of focus on the least of my actions — a fidgeting hand, a facial twitch, a sudden inhalation — is unmistakable in its rigor.

The poet Alison Hawthorne Deming accompanied Steve on one of these hikes more than a decade ago. She evocatively describes her own moment of eye-to-eye encounter with the spotted owl: “We exchange the long, slow, interspecies stare,” she writes; “no fear, no threat, only the confusing mystery of the other.” It’s astonishing to me how true Deming’s account rings—how precisely her experience, a decade past, prefigures my own.

The spotted owl is known to science as Strix occidentalis: Western crier. The genus name, Strix, is shared by some twenty species, collectively known as the wood owls, who comprise one province of the order Strigiformes. Strix, striges — these names come down to us from the ancient Romans, for whom the owl’s nocturnal cry was one of the shapes of metamorphosis, numinous and infernal. Ovid, in his Fasti, describes the visage called forth out of this sound: the “great head, fixed eyes, beak shaped for plunder.” Est illis strigibus nomen: Cry, they are called. Their throats filled with the blood they drink. Ancient shapeshifters, furies of the night — such criers seem a far cry from the fluffed and sated owl staring down on me in the forest now. And yet they do loom here out of the depths of these eyes, with their glint and clarity: the blood-guttered cry, the haunted hoot. Such striges are told of in the legends of the voles, perhaps, as they huddle in their burrows amidst the mycorrhizae; the fasti of the voles must churn with anxious songs.

John Berger proposes that “animals come from over the horizon”; that they “first entered the imagination as messengers and promises.” Animals bear secrets, Berger postulates—“secrets which, unlike the secrets of caves, mountains, seas, are specifically addressed to man.” I begin to suspect that animals live in a world that is a lot like myth; their every interaction or experience is an encounter is with primordial forces, icons, and avatars. At the same time, animals sound and cry, they mark and nest, they patrol; their activities are ineluctably those of placemaking. Animals contend with their own divinity and the vexations and pleasures of place. This is the garden we got ourselves kicked out of.

I know that the ruffed disc of the owl’s face evolved to gather sound; that the eyes, cylindrical like the barrels of binoculars, are fixed in their sockets, making every glance a stare. But these eyes — these wells of black deep enough to swallow an endlessness of mice — surpass intelligence in the keenness of their regard. There is mystery in them, to be sure, a treasury of mystery, boundless and deep. But no confusion, I think. Confusion is the human harvest, and a late one — our bounty, our endowment, in an unmoored age.

From a certain perspective, to be sure, the bas-relief of the owl’s face, the transfixing depths of its stare, is fashioned by mere evolutionary forces; any sense it offers of intelligence or consciousness, in this view, is an artifact, mere epiphenomenon. And yet I recall that our own faces, too, are figured by such forces; that intelligence is just another shape things take in the world. Face to face, we make selves of each other in the swerve of these forces.

This is forest work.

In April, I spent two weeks in the H. J. Andrews Experimental Forest, on a writing residency with the amazing Spring Creek Project at Oregon State University. This is the first in a series of posts gleaned from notes and media I took with me from the Forest.