Words: 943
Music: None. huh. What does that say about rituals?
We were sitting in the swing in the backyard, just enjoying the twilight before the mosquitos came out in droves, when Ben spotted the owl in the hackberry. He just kept his eyes on us while we got the binoculars for a closer look. He wasn’t a great horned owl, though there is one of those in the neighborhood, and he was too big to be one of those miniature owls that dot the tony Hyde Park neighborhood (back when we lived there it seemed like some nights there was one on every stop sign). I definitely need a bird book.
And a camera with a telefoto.
He’ll have good hunting tonight. There’s plenty of urban wildlife in the area. We live next to a ditch (the realtor called it a dry creek, we call it the ditch) and there’s plenty of greenery in the neighborhood. Down along Arroyo Seco, I’ve seen heron spearing toads.
We have possum of course, raccoons, rats (yuck! One day I’ll tell the rat story), bats, swallows, anoles, geckos, you name it. Last weekend a buzzard swooped down on some squirrel roadkill and dragged it up to the neighbor’s roof to eat at his leisure.
There’s a hawk in the parking lot at work — red tail maybe? There’s plenty of hunting, seeing as the building used to be a bread factory and we haven’t quite flushed out all of the rats. Every so often you will hear shrieks rising up from various departments as yet another Templeton makes an appearance.
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