ON HOW TO SURVIVE AS A BARN OWL — OLIVIA KINGERY
/You have to be quick, Tyto alba. Make your nest on the side of a high cliff. Work your body into the clay. This will be helpful when you’re hundreds of years older, making a nest in a barn wall rather than a tree. Don’t worry about that yet. You’re in Europe where your species was first discovered. This is before.
In the reflection of the ocean under your cliff home, you see a ghost staring back, but you are the ghost, a heart-shaped face of symmetry. When you mate, it is for life unless your partner is killed, unless you are killed, in which case a new bond can be formed.
They’ll call this monogamy, you call this life. As a female, the male will court you with dance and song, swooping high into the sky before love diving towards what will become your nest. This thrills you. He brings you mice, voles, snakes, shrews, rats, never earthworms.
You sometimes hunt together, gliding low to the ground over possible meals. This will be your downfall—the need to hunt on the move, explore your space in freedom.
Learn your voice. It is not a hoot like your other owl cousins but a screech, a cry. Humans will fear you for this, call you the demon owl, death owl, ghost owl. Humans will kill you for this; seek you out in nature and then in their own buildings and then one day the searching stops because you’re gone.
You’ll never be ready for the end; for the developing of grasslands and draining of wetlands and soon there is no space left to nest. But the largest threat is one you never dreamed of because you can’t dream of metal before you know it. You’ll never be ready to maneuver between windshields, between the force of a steel body meeting an earthly one.
In the night, maybe it is your last, you will be hunting over open land. Part of this land is a road but you don’t know this. You’re on the move and hungry, hoping to find a vole before returning back to your nest in the wall of a barn close by. You’re on the move and sweeping low over the black earth as a shrew scurries across the void. You’re on the move but there is something so bright you cannot keep moving. Overwhelmed by the rush of sound and force and headlights, you’re hit by a family on their way home from the zoo. They saw barn owls. They didn’t see you.
Olivia Kingery is a farmer and writer living on 80 acres in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. She chats with earthworms in the summer, snowshoes with the dogs in the winter, and hangs out with her chickens all year long. More of her work can be found at oliviakingery.com, and her farm adventures can be found on Instagram at @pileatedfarms.
