For The Birds
By Neal Wooten
I actually don’t know any authentic bird watchers, but I’m sure the mountain must be full of them because it would be a bird watcher’s paradise. There are wrens, swallows, dove, robins, cardinals, woodpeckers, blue jays, quail, and probably a hundred other species.
I still recall seeing those flocks of blackbirds that would be a hundred yards across and stretch for miles and miles. They would literally take several hours to pass. Does anyone remember seeing those? I can’t remember the last time I saw them in those numbers.
The thing that really excited me as a kid was twice a year seeing those V formations of wild ducks and geese fly over. They would be so high sometimes you could barely see them and sometimes they would be just over the tree line. In the fall, I always dreamed of shooting one down and us having it for Thanksgiving, but I hated the thought of killing anything. Well, that and I couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn.
Red tail hawks were my favorite and the mountain is covered with them. They’re so majestic and you would think a powerful raptor such as these would have no natural enemy. Wrong. Those wicked crows never met a hawk they liked and can actually kill them. Many times, I watched as crows attacked a hawk and even thought they were screaming “Hawk” instead of “Caw.”
Speaking of birds of prey, forget eagles and hawks. The scariest winged creatures on the mountain are the owls. These are not those cute little fluffy owls you see on TV; owls on the mountain are like mutations from a radiation leak.
When I was 16, I was wakened in the middle of the night to a horrific sound. I rushed out the front door to see two owls trying to get into my little brother’s rabbit pen. I yelled and they flew away, but I could make out their bodies in the moonlight as their wings, which had a span of four feet at least, made loud whooshing sounds as they fanned the air. The next day, we could see where they had literally torn away strips of metal fencing with their beaks.
My cousin next door once caught an owl trying to get into his chicken coup, and he kept it in a cage for a few days before releasing it. I saw it with my own eyes. It was almost three feet tall and had blue feathers. Yes – blue. It looked like it not only could carry off a small child, but that it wanted to.
Of all the wonderful animals of the mountain, birds are some of my favorites.