Western screech owl wins my heart

After I chatted with the owl guru for a bit and took a bunch of photos, I walked a little way down the regional trail I was on, but as I wasn’t in an actual park I realized there was nothing there I wanted to see other than the owl, so I might as well go to a park for some “real” hiking. So I soon turned around. Obviously I stopped at the owl again and took a bunch more pictures. Several people stopped and talked to me, including a local who told me all about the owl, and a couple who hadn’t seen the owl but once I pointed him out gave me a bunch of tips for finding wildlife at a nearby park they frequent. (People in California are generally very nice, I’ve noticed. Or at least the wildlife-friendly, park-visiting people.) Anyway, after a while I decided I didn’t want my presence to stress the bird out (not that he seemed to care much what anyone was doing below him), so I reluctantly packed up the “real” camera and headed back to my car. Once at the car I had to stop myself from turning right back around and walking back to the owl. It was tough…

Oh, and maybe an owl post isn’t the most likely place for me to bring up animal intelligence (despite the “wise owl” notion, owls aren’t the smartest animals…), but I read a good book recently and if you read this blog because you love animals as much as I do you might like it. I don’t think any person can be summed up in two words, but if you absolutely had to, you could probably sum me up with the two words “loves animals”. My love of animals pretty much shapes my entire life: nearly all of my volunteer work involves wildlife and I was just hired by one of the wildlife hospitals to occasionally act as a paid animal caretaker, I’ve been vegan for many years because I don’t want to eat animals, I consider my cats my best friends, and one of my biggest hobbies is wildlife photography. As a kid, one day in Sunday school, our teacher casually mentioned that animals don’t have souls and that we would not see any animals, including our own pets, in heaven. I had a BIG problem with that and was pretty much done with Sunday school at that moment; in fact I caused such a disturbance arguing about it that I was asked to leave the class and go upstairs to sit with my parents in church. (The teachers also didn’t believe me when I truthfully told them my parents weren’t IN church so I therefore spent the rest of that morning hanging out in the graveyard stewing over this animal/soul issue.) “Souls” and cognition are not the same thing (though both are ill-defined), but the church claiming that animals don’t have souls reminds me a lot of the “humans are special” theories that separate humans from the rest of the animal kingdom. For a long time it was explained that animals are basically creatures without thought, which has always really, really bothered me. Has no one arguing that position ever owned a pet? Or MET AN ANIMAL? Those that still want to separate humans from other animals are struggling these days and have to keep changing their definition of how we differ as more and more experiments prove that many animals are much, much smarter than previously thought – some in ways that are very similar to us (other primates, obviously), and some in ways we can barely grasp because it’s just so different than us (like octopi). Birds especially are proving to be much smarter than we could ever have conceived (though owls still aren’t one of the brighter species!). Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? by Frans de Waal was a really good read about animal cognition, discussing de Waal’s own and other experiments with captive animals as well as many scientific observations of wild animals. (de Waal probably wouldn’t even approve of me disparaging owl intelligence, and in a way, it’s not fair of me to do because owls are REALLY good at doing what they need to do, but I work with owls, and they are no crows!) I read a lot and mostly – 87% year-to-date this year – fiction, so I’m very picky about which non-fiction books I read and this one was right up my alley. It was a fast, easy, enjoyable read that left me thinking “I KNEW IT!!!” at the end of every chapter, and it left me feeling even more a part of the animal kingdom…like all humans should.