For a strange two weeks, a newspaper photographer in Miami was taking some pretty unique pictures. But they weren’t coming from her day job; they were from her backyard.
At work, Emily Michot and her husband, Walt, are photojournalists for the Miami Herald. At home, they’re parents with two sons: Michael’s 8, and Ryan is 10. And their Miami Shores house can get a bit rowdy.
But a few weeks ago, when Walt Michot was picking up the boys from karate class, Emily Michot was home alone, and the house was uncommonly quiet.
“That’s when I noticed that there was this — this odd noise,” she says. “I can’t even describe it. It was alive. I knew it was alive.”
In the first house my husband and I owned, we had a glassed in back porch. There was a low tree/shrub that pressed right up against the glass on one side. One year a pair of cardinals made a nest in the tree — on the “far” side where it couldn’t be seen from outside, or so they thought. Of course, it was the side pressing right against the glass of our porch. For some reason, they didn’t seem to feel that that side was unprotected (or they couldn’t see in.) For several weeks we had a ring-side seat to watch the eggs hatch and the parents feeding the babies. Then, one day, they were all gone.
In the house we live in now, we have a hanging basket of New Zealand Impatiens hanging on the front porch. For three years now the same finch family has nested inside the basket. Mom won’t come to the nest (or flies out of it) if I peek in, so I have to wait until I see mom elsewhere and then take a quick peek. On the day I don’t see any babies (the day they fledge) I keep our cat in for a week so I know everybody has a chance to learn to fly and stay out of harm’s way!
I recommend hunting down a copy of Owl by William Service for another, peculiarly moving view into the life of a screech owl.
We have what I think are a pair of barred owls nesting in our wood lot up behind our house. They locate themselves about 150 feet apart from each other, one probably on the nest and the other on guard, and they ‘hoot’ back and forth to each other. It really great to listen to their conversation.
As a side note, about 250 feet from the nearest owl’s location, I found the remains of two raptor kills of blue jays. The second blue jay was ‘taken down’ about three weeks after the first jay. My guess is that the owl’s were ensuring that there would be no nest robbing jays hanging around their nest.