This morning I read a beautifully written article by Rick Marsi, who we’ve appreciated before. He’s musing about the unexplained absence of a pair of owls that had been observed year after year in his familiar woods. He had come to mark the seasons by their presence. Of of course I thought of our beavers, who have not been seen since before Halloween and are MIA at present. The article comments on our responsibility as stewards who protect wildlife by noticing it, which allows us to notice its absence.

Listen for the owls

I stand in the woods and watch darkness descend. The western sky pinkens, flares briefly, then dissolves into deep ocean blue. Cold air drifts off the mountain, slips past bare maple branches, rattles oak leaves as stiff as starched collars. Songbirds roost tucked in knotholes or deep within evergreen boughs.

A full moon creeps skyward. I stand and I listen for owls.

Nothing. No resonant hoots from the forest primeval. No great horned owl basso profundo. During courtship, two owls will perch in a woodland and hoot their commitment until dawn’s early light makes them sleepy.

If you listen to this in the same woods each year, you expect it to go on forever. If it doesn’t, you listen and hear something empty. You sense a stage without actors, an orchestra pit void of violins, woodwinds and brass. The woods is dressed up but has nowhere to go. Without owls it is negative space.

Maybe they’re just slow in starting this year. Maybe not. Maybe something has changed. If it has, and they’re gone, I’ll have trouble adjusting. You can have your 50 music channels, but I want owl hoots come November.

What if, next spring, swallows did not show up at the pond where you know they should be? Or if blooms on your coneflowers blossomed in vain, unable to attract fritillaries and hummingbird moths? If that happened, my guess is, you would hear an alarm. Smacked in the face, you would stop taking nature for granted. Beaver ponds do not come with a guaranteed pair of wood ducks. Dragonflies aren’t a given. The beavers themselves may get trapped or move off somewhere else.

Nature abounds with stages upon which we assume, every year, all the actors we know from last year will show up to perform. But assumptions fuel complacency. And complacency keeps us from keeping an eye peeled for changes and why they occur.

One autumn we climb the mountain expecting to see thousands of migrating hawks and see hundreds. Nothing’s written in stone. In this overpopulated, overexploited, overdeveloped world, nature cannot take care of itself.

I’ll be thinking these thoughts while I stand in the dark, listening hard for my owls to start hooting.

The closer I read this article, the gloomier it gets. He implies that his owls have died or disappeared because of our interference – their favorite tree was cut, or their diet was laced with rat poison. He thinks they aren’t showing because of something he didn’t stop from happening, which is possible, and which I have felt many, many times watching anxiously for ‘our’ beavers.

But, over the years of watching, I have learned that sometimes owls and beavers don’t do what you expect. They just don’t.

Expectations are a box, with windows and an address. We want them to go where we know and do what we expect in the places we can observe. We are never happy when they make decisions without consulting us  for reasons we will never, ever understand; a noise, a breeze, a sudden shift of temperature or light. I would hazard that that’s why these creatures are fascinating and that’s why we watch them. Because they help us touch the tiny part of ourselves that isn’t planned and expected, and even more importantly, belongs to no one.

We want owls and beavers to show up when we visit their old address. But they are hunter-gatherers, nomads, and driftwood. No one really knows where they’ll be tomorrow. I think our responsibility as stewards is just to keep looking, remember them, celebrate them, protect the spaces they might possibly occupy, and cherish the moments when we find them.

And keep listening, Rick.