OWLS
BARN OWL 1
BARN OWN 2
BARN OWL 3
BARN OWL 4
BARN OWL 5
BARN OWL 6
BARN OWL 7
BARN OWL 8
BARN OWL 9
BARN OWL 10
BARN OWL 11
BARN OWL 12
Several years ago I created the painting “Barn Owl 4: Encounter” for my book "Wheels, Wings, and Windows"; this painting also appeared on the cover of the East Bay Monthly in December, 2002. For the show “Come into Animal Presence” at the Dream Institute in Berkeley I continued exploring the beauty of this bird.
My husband and I visited the Lindsay Wildlife Museum in Walnut Creek to see a resident barn owl, who had been badly injured and can’t be returned to the wild. The staff kindly brought her out into the lobby so we could see her closely and photograph her. She is extremely beautiful and alert – barn owls hunt primarily by sound (they have large ears behind their face feathers, and one ear is higher than the other, providing them with a “triangulating” ability in locating prey). Her head would turn with every sound she heard, sometime half circle, and she often spread her magnificent wings (she was tethered to her keeper’s heavy glove). Barn owls belong to a different family from all other owls and have distinctive heart-shaped faces and proportionately larger wings and longer legs.
I also began checking in at a live web cam of a barn owl nest in Benicia (see Links), where “Frida and Diego” have been raising owlets for several years. Furthermore, the City of Berkeley has recently adopted the barn owl as its official city bird, and is encouraging area residents to install nesting boxes to provide homes for these birds who normally nest in a dwindling supply of abandoned buildings and tree cavities (see Links). Recently an arborist was taking down a palm tree on Lakeshore Avenue in Oakland and found two baby barn owls, which he took to a wildlife center – so they are right here! And as well as being beautiful, barn owls provide poison-free rodent control.