A Little Night Music

When the TV is off, conversation gives way to reading, traffic and neighborhood noises are all but nonexistent, and the weather is perfect for having the windows open in the house, that's when it's time for a little night music. At least on the nights when you are lucky. It's not like we live anywhere but in the middle of a vastly overdeveloped desert.

One can almost pretend one is the only person awake in the world, until, a mile and a half away, the oh-dark-thirty train goes by. If the pack is anywhere nearby, or better yet, if competing packs are out running the neighborhood, the coyotes start to sing. One can tell where they are hunting this evening by the direction and distance of the songs, but one has to pay attention because they don't last long.

I can always hope the music stops because the pack has scented another rabbit to rid the world of, but maybe that's just me, hating having to fence the world.

Nighttime, when you are really lucky, is also when an owl might come and sit in a tree and hoot briefly for whatever owl reasons they do. We occasionally had one visiting the big pine in the front yard. Now that the front yard tree has died and been removed, we're much more likely to hear an owl from the back of the house, presumably from a perch in the remaining big pine. If we go out to try to view it, the music stops, so we just enjoy it from the house.

This weekend I was having trouble deciding whether I was hearing "our" owl from the front or back window. I was hearing a lot more hooting and lasting much longer than usual, so I had more time to try to figure it out. It was in the usual pattern, two quick hoots, then two slower ones. In a bit, a slight difference in pitch caught my attention. On a musical scale there might have been a half tone of difference, like between a B flat and a B. Not being blessed with perfect pitch, having only fairly decent relative pitch, I am making absolutely no claim on what the two pitches were, just their slight difference.

Just as I was detecting the pitch differences, I was able to sort out that the deeper pitch came through the rear windows, and the higher from the front. There were two owls! I just closed up my book and sat and enjoyed the concert while it lasted.