Last night at 3.00am exactly, I heard the Great horned owl call. Very close, somewhere right in the back yard. The windows were open because a light monsoon event had brought fresh rain-cooled air, so the call, though soft, carried clearly.

Great horned owls are regulars in our area because there are plenty of perches, and plenty for them to eat. A favorite owly destination is a big Aleppo pine in our back yard. At night that tree is stuffed with roosting doves and other perching birds, a veritable Fresh and Easy for owls. Sitting outside at dark with friends, we’ve watched a horned owl glide stealthily into mid-level branches and then listened as panic ensued among the roosting doves as the owl hopped between branches as if it were going aisle to aisle in a grocery store, filling a cart. Finally it burst out of the needles with a meal clutched in its talons. We got a good look at it is it slid past us, sihouetted against the lights of the house. The feather pool under the pine the next morning was evidence that it had enjoyed a bit of mourning dove.

They are not called “Flying tigers” for nothing. Horned owls, like toadlets, will eat anything that moves and fits down the gullet. Rock squirrels, snakes, desert cottontails, other birds (even other owls), insects, and bats — all are fair game. Even small pets may be at risk, if left unsupervised after dark. The first owl I ever saw was at the family dinner table when I was a kid: a thump, a commotion, and we looked up to see the underside of a Great horned owl pressed to the window, wings flapping against the glass. The owl was trying to separate the family cat (a calico named Ringo, to give you an idea how long ago this was) from the window ledge. A grown cat is awfully heavy prey, however, and the owl had to give up after a few seconds. No one was hurt, but the bird went away hungry. (It was a spectacular view of an owl in action, and I’ve wondered if that was THE bird for me, in a formative sense — I was no more than seven). The boldest hunters are often adults with young to feed — a nest full of hungry owlets requires a lot of sustenance. During that time of the year, parent owls sometimes can be seen hunting even during daylight, working a day job to put food on the table. So, hatching and fledging are timed to coincide with the local peak of yearly rodent production, usually spring, but in the desert areas often much earlier.

Our local owls have reproduced, and sometimes I’ve heard the distinctive, raspy oink of a horned owlet begging, installed on the top of a phone pole while its parents search the alleys for rats or young cottontails to stuff into it. (If you enjoy camping, you’ve heard a sound like it: the creak made by the plastic hinge on a cooler lid when it’s raised.) The female makes the same sound during courtship while soliciting her mate for food. In our area, courting owls can be seen and heard duetting on phone poles and rooftops, visible against the fading sunset sky. As they call together or alternately — the male and female have slightly different voices and cadences — they bow and “hoo.” She holds her tail up, soliciting attention from the male, who strikes a courtly pose to “sing,” tail raised and wings down, maximizing himself like an operatic baritone (he’s smaller than her). Here’s an excellent quote, where the author’s voice slides from ornithologist to owl, almost inadvertently:

“Courtship is fairly boisterous and involves bowing, bobbing, posturing, vocalizing, and allopreening. These elaborate activities lead, as one might hope, to copulation.” (from Hans Peeters, Field Guide to Owls of California and the West, my current favorite owl sourcebook. In the same series as the excellent book on Horned lizards, the California Natural History Guides, published by the UC Press)

If it’s still light enough while all this is going on, you can see flashes of white feathers at their throats, the “gular patch”, flashing as each hoot puffs the owl’s throat briefly. It’s a semaphore for them, like the feather tufts on the top of the head: a way of producing meaningful signals to each other: facial expressions without flexible tissue like lips or eyebrows.

As big, powerful generalist predators, Great horned owls can make it almost anywhere. Their range is right across the US and Canada through Central America and into northern South America. They live in urban, rural, and wilderness areas: desert, woodlands, mountains, wetlands, grasslands and cities, so the chances are you have them where you live, too. Keep an eye open, an ear cocked, and the Chihuahua in at night.

Below are Horned owl salt and pepper shakers from Three Star Owl. Each pair is an adult with an owlet in different stages of development ($48/pair).

One of my simple pleasures is going on early morning walks with E around the buttes in Papago Park. We can walk there from our house, and though the walks are for health, we always make note of birds and the other animals we see.

A first impression of this landscape is accurate: a worn scrap of urban desert, surrounded by buildings and golf courses. (At 1200 acres, this scrap seems to be getting smaller all the time, as the City of Phoenix doesn’t seem to be able to keep its hands to itself: even this morning we noticed a shiny chain link fence slashed across the creosote flats, closer to the butte trail than just a few days ago; a golf-course expansion, I suppose, because Phoenix doesn’t have enough acres in fairways?) I don’t have a biologist’s expertise, but the buttes and the land between them don’t seem to be a rich or terribly diverse environment. Next to the lush Zoo and wonderful Desert Botanical Garden, where the birding is always great, the part of Papago west of the parkway seems especially barren. Sometimes we only see a handful of bird species, and no mammals but other humans and their dogs (and only a few of those in our early hours). But over the years and through all seasons in all weather, we’ve discovered that there’s more in Poor Old Papago than you might expect.

This morning’s walk was a perfect example. In addition to the numerous mourning doves and house finches, there were two Loggerhead shrikes in the park, fierce “functional raptors” looking for a protein-rich breakfast like a grasshopper or small lizard. They were making their ratchety “shrike-shrike” call from the tops of the greened-up creosotes, so we heard them before we saw them, though once we got closer the shrikes’ bold gray, black and white plumage blinked in the sun. The verdins saw the shrikes too, emitting incessant alarm calls and flicking their wings.

The serious, top-order predators were out, too: a Red-tailed hawk launched itself with a cry off the rock we call “Jaws” and flew south to the biggest butte, Barnes Butte (named after Will C. Barnes who is known himself for writing a book on Arizona place names). And the ‘yotes were out: Coyotes are pretty common in the park. This morning we saw two together, an apparent family: an adult and young one, looking a bit scruffy, like the park itself. We’ve seen coyotes actually stalk dog-walkers, maybe keeping an eye on things until the other four-legs are off their patch of land. When fire engines hurtle by, the Butte “goes off” and invisible ‘yotes howl and yip until the sirens are faint.

There’s plenty for the coyotes to eat, actually, if they can catch it. Stray cats, for instance. (When we first started walking in the park, one of our landmarks was “Half-cat Stash” — a bit of feline jerky with clumped, sun-bleached pelt patches that was gradually being reduced by some not very picky predator) Also, there are Black-tailed jackrabbits. We’ve seen as many as eleven during one walk, their radiator-ears glowing pink with the low sun shining through them. Desert cotton-tails are common, too. These tough lagomorphs are numerous enough in the park so that the City has had to chicken-wire the young saguaros to keep them from being girdled by gnawing teeth. The cactus situation is at best marginal in the park: there are few new ones coming up, and some of the old saguaros are dying: one we called the “Condo” because it hosted numerous starlings and a Gila woodpecker or two just recently came down in a monsoon windstorm. Now it’s lying there rotting, gradually watering its nurse tree. Hard to believe this land was designated Papago Saguaro National Monument from 1914 until 1930, known for the stately columnar cactus. But now, Papago definitely calls out for some succulent guerilla gardening…

Even after all the walks we’ve taken In Papago Park, E and I are still seeing things for the first time, like the barrel cactus we found this summer only because the monsoon has been better than usual. Normally invisible against the gravelly soil the heads of several barrels blazed out in the washes because rain had soaked them over night and their normally dry, brown spines had taken on their true color: bright red. We know where one hedgehog cactus grows, having seen it only because it was in full bloom. There are even pincushion cactus, Mammillaria grahamii (or “mammo-grahams” as we’ve nicknamed them, Graham’s nipple cactus) tucked away on a sunny slope of the little butte. One day we hope to catch them blooming, too. Even more invisible was a Lesser nighthawk on her nest, staunchly incubating through the monsoon season, hidden in plain sight under a small creosote. We don’t know for sure if she successfully fledged her young, but we’d like to think so.  Can you find her invisibly sitting tight on her nest in the photo above (Spot the Bird)?

There are always surprises: last fall a gleaming, swift Prairie falcon lingered in the high rocks and air overhead; we watched it for two weeks before it moved on. Also, what was left of a Barn owl, abandoned on the top of a rock after it had become a meal for a Great horned owl (they’re there although we’ve never seen one — occasionally there’s a softly barred feather caught fluttering in a shrub). There are strangers, too: an exotic male zebra finch hung out with a flock of native house finches for a week or so; and nearby there’s a thriving breeding population of Budgies (parakeets) nesting in saguaro cavities.

Lodged in the cracks between Phoenix, Tempe, and Scottsdale, Papago Park may not seem a terribly wild place, but it is something very precious in the middle of the metropolitan area: open desert space in an area that’s been the residential heart of the Rio Salado settlement for thousands of years.

Poor Old Papago Park. There’s been talk of “improvement” for Papago for years. Does it need improvement? In my view “Improvement” doesn’t always include parking lots, pavement or pathways. Because the beauties and benefits of Papago are subtle and in their natural state, I fear they will be overlooked by ambitious city managers, profit-seeking developers and even well-meaning citizens eager to “improve” something that doesn’t need improvement, but rather a little appreciation for what it is.

All photos©threestarowl.com. All photos in this post taken by E. Shock in Papago Park, except the Loggerhead shrike, taken on the Margie’s Cove trail in the Maricopa Mountains.