The Owl That Wasn’t There

My dad was fond of the A.A. Milne poem that goes

As I climbed upon the stair

I met a man who wasn’t there

He wasn’t there again today.

Oh, how I wish he’d go away.

I didn’t think much about it as a kid—he was just being whimsical—but it strikes me now that perhaps he identified somewhat with the man who wasn’t there. A melancholy thought.

Hilary and I occasionally (fairly often, in fact) go out looking for birds that don’t turn out to be there. And I sometimes search for a particular bird on the ebird website only to discover than an even more interesting one has been sighted in the same vicinity. Last winter I was hunting up a barred owl in our neighborhood and discovered incidentally that a much less common bird, the saw-whet owl, had been sighted repeatedly at a park five minutes from our house.

A week or so ago I was checking for sightings of the rough-legged hawk, which visits us in the winter time. I hadn't seen one, and hoped to see one before they all left for the arctic. I discovered, to my surprise, that a short-eared owl had been sighted repeatedly at a wildlife management area west of Marine on the St. Croix called Keystone. Not just one, but three. That particular owl has never even been on my radar. One morning we drove out to take a look.

The “park” consists of a parking lot on Manning Drive just south of County 4, a few miles east of Hugo. A few dirt roads lead out into the grassy hills but they were closed due to the spring mud. We got out of the car and immediately began scanning the bare branched of a copse of trees tucked into the hills nearby. Nothing. 

Suddenly a very large bird appeared out of nowhere and flew ten feet above my head, landing on a branch of a fallen tree on the edge of a gully. I tried to convince myself it was a skinny owl, but eventually had to concede that it was a large hawk. A rough-legged hawk. Well, that was something.

We spotted two killdeers on the open gravel before heading down one of the muddy roads through the grasses. It reminded me of northern New Mexico, but without the sage and rabbitbrush. We soon decided to veer uphill in the direction of some woods to the west, where we now presumed the owls would be hanging out. We followed along some tracks made weeks or months ago by off-road vehicles through the thick grasses, passing one small lake, then a larger one, up and down the hills, and finally reached the edge of the woods on the west side of the property.

Nothing.

But is landscape nothing? Knowledge of the countryside? With Big Marine Lake to the north, O’Brien State Park to the east, and the deli of the Marine general store just a few minutes away?

Looking back to the east, we could no longer see the tin shed on the far side of the road near where we’d parked, but we could see the bare tops of the now distant trees near the lot arching above the grassy hills.

It was a sunny morning, windy and cold. The landscape was expansive, and we were having a good time, though I kept imagining we’d come up a gravel road just over the next hill that we could take back to the car.

That road never materialized. Nor did the owls. But we trudged through the grasses along random tracks—up, down, left, right—on a meandering route, mindful of the sun and a distant stop sign that was intermittently visible out on Manning Drive.

Back home, hours later, I reviewed the owl reports again and noticed that they’d all been filed not in the morning but late in the afternoon or at dusk. Hmm. Perhaps we should take another look.

But it’s a forty-minute drive. And they might not be there again.