Life After Downton Abbey

Something very sad happened to me recently. The great horned owl family that I have been watching obsessively since February on the Savannah Owls bird cam have now left the nest. First I watched the parents settle into the nest. Then I watched the mother sit patiently on her two eggs for endless days, as the wind and snow blew on her, and I watched the father bring in food or sit on the eggs so the mother could have a break. The eggs hatched, and I got to watch two of the most ugly-cute baby birds on earth grow up, with their ghostly white feathers and their even spookier wide, staring eyes. I shuddered as the dead animals piled up in the nest - mice, rats, squirrels, egrets, and other unidentified birds - and the babies slowly learned to pull chunks of dead flesh off the bone and feed themselves. I watched with dread as the parents spent less and less time on the nest and the owlets began to climb the branches of the tree around the nest, flexing and flapping their developing wings. And then, suddenly, the sad days came, as each of the owlets disappeared from sight. For a couple of days, the mother would come back to the nest with food, and sometimes be able to call the owlets back, but for the last two days there has been nothing.

I know they’re out there in the world together, and that the parents will continue to guide and protect the owlets for months until they can hunt successfully on their own and stake out their own territories. But I won’t see all of that happen from here on out, and it feels like the same kind of loss I experienced when six seasons of Downton Abbey came to an end and I no longer had those “friends” in my life.

Bird cams are a revolutionary technology growing in popularity. They bring us into the most intimate sphere of the bird world. We admire the birds for their hard work, tenacity, and long hours of caring for offspring. We see how helpless the babies are and how quickly they develop. We even give them names. The eagle family featured on the Washington, D.C., eagle cam are “Mr. President” and “The First Lady”. (Next year will they be the Clintons? The Trumps? The Cruzes? The Sanderses? Only time will tell!)

Bird cams also make us face the horrible realities of nature: that somebody has to die in order for somebody else to live, or that sometimes somebody dies for no good reason at all. Whole families and offices full of people cheered as the bald eaglets hatched in Hanover, Pennsylvania, and then expressed horror as one died in the nest, for no clear reason. The Washington, D.C., eagle cam website even posts the following warning:

“This is a wild eagle nest and anything can happen. While we hope that these two healthy juvenile eagles will end up fledging from the nest this summer, things like sibling rivalry, predators, and natural disaster can affect this eagle family and may be difficult to watch.”

Like reality television, the bird cam industry is expanding. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology alone hosts 15 cameras on a variety of species, from hummingbirds in West Texas to an albatross nest in Hawaii. Daily moments on the cams are tweeted, shared on Facebook, and captured in videos for Youtube. As with all other internet and social media phenomena, they are changing us and our experiences of life. For example, the intimacy of the camera now makes the nests in my yard seem a little dull. I can’t stand next to the Leyland cypress and peer into the chipping sparrow nest several hours a day without running the poor, scared little things off and without developing leg cramps from standing on a ladder. A couple of weeks ago I was at the National Conservation Training Center in Shepherdstown, WV, looking through binoculars at a bald eagle nest that I watch online here, and it was a real letdown to see it in person, from far away, with an obstructed view because of the tree branches. Sitting in my office, staring at my computer suddenly seemed the more “real” way to interact with nature. Funny, huh? The internet as the best and most real way to celebrate nature.

Today I went to the Savannah Owls cam website, desperately hoping that maybe the camera would catch one of the owlets back in the nest for a daytime sleep and I could smile at how much he has grown in the last couple of days. To my surprise, there was a pair of ospreys on the nest instead. I am watching them now as they check out the nest and call to each other. Will they nest there? Will they successfully raise a family? Will the owls return? Will the owls kill and eat the osprey chicks after I have fallen in love with them? As with any soap opera cliffhanger, I will definitely have to tune in tomorrow and find out more.

Animal Frenemies

Like many people, I love viral videos about lions that befriend baby antelopes or zoos where tigers decide to be best buddies with the live goats given to them as food. I watch with awe, and knuckles tightened, as people show videos on youtube of their cat playing sweetly with their cockatiel or a bunch of ducklings sleeping serenely on the back of a bird dog. I’m even enjoying my own “lion lies down with the lamb” scenario here at home, with two cats and a rabbit running around in the living room together, giving off an air of happy curiosity, occasionally sniffing each other’s faces. It’s heart-melting stuff.

I’ve been obsessively watching the live birdcam hosted by Skidaway Audubon Society in Savannah, Georgia, trained on a great horned owl nest. (You can watch two live cams here or go to “highlights” for videos of some of the most interesting moments.) It seems as if the spring nesting season will never get here, and fortunately great-horned owls start their nesting season in January. So I can watch the mother - and occasionally the father, when she needs to have a break or go hunting - on the nest, keeping two good-sized eggs warm on cold winter nights.

This morning on the bird cam, I observed a couple of interesting things. First, I heard a squirrel squawking and watched as Momma Owl got more alert and interested, rolling her head around in that amazing way that owls have. I saw the squirrel come up the tree, eye level with the owl, and shake its tail. The owl tensed up, stood, clicked her bill menacingly, and rushed at the squirrel, feathers fanned out so that she looked twice her size. The squirrel ran off but continued to squawk from nearby for at least 15 minutes. Momma Owl eventually relaxed and started looking a little sleepy. Then the pesky squirrel jumped over her nest, from one branch to another, and the process began again. The squirrel was messing with her!

Just after the squirrel incident, there was a moment of much greater tension. I could hear American crows having what I call their “morning coffee”. Crows live in large, extended families and communities, and early in the morning they like to meet together in a group of tens or hundreds and call to each other for half an hour or so. I like to think they are discussing the previous day’s news and checking in about what’s up for the day ahead before they fly off in different directions. This morning the crows were very close to the nest, and Momma Owl seemed to respond with a great deal of concern, even hooting for a while, perhaps as a warning to the crows or to summon her mate in case she needed protection.

Squirrels and crows are the prey of great horned owls, which eat just about anything in the size range between frogs and large Cooper’s hawks, including other great horned owls. But Momma Owl looked vulnerable when the squirrel and crows were on the scene. If she were in the air, and could swoop down on that squirrel, the squirrel would be lunch. Sitting in her nest, needing to protect her eggs from cold air or egg-stealing species (such as squirrels and crows), however, she was vulnerable. A great horned owl is not agile enough to suddenly rise up in the air and fasten her powerful talons around a squirrel, nor do the size and shape of her bill allow her to grab at a quick, clever, squirrel-sized mammal unless she already has it subdued within her talons. There was nothing she could do except try to scare the squirrel away. The squirrel finally gave up; it had made its point. But that squirrel had better sleep with one eye open tonight, if you know what I mean.

I’ve noticed Momma Owl’s fear of the crows on other days. Her best strategy there seems to be to lay low and hope they don’t notice her. Crows are not afraid to mob and harass owls and other predators when they are in flight. But it is hard to believe that crows would try to force Momma Owl out of her nest. Why would they want to get her in the air, where she’s more of a threat to them? Nevertheless, crows are often seen harassing and taunting nesting owls for long periods of time. Again, crows seem to enjoy messing with them! This interesting column offers a thought-provoking explanation that the crows are acting out their fear and hatred of owls. There is also the possibility that crows - and squirrels - are engaging in signaling behavior, a well-documented survival strategy in which a prey animal deliberately gets close to a predator in order to say, “See, I’m so fast and strong that I know I can get away from you - so you might as well not even try!”

My point here is that there are always conditions when the prey can have a little fun with the predator or when the vulnerability is temporarily reversed. But predators are predators and prey are prey - and a change of conditions will always right the situation. In other words, I put my money on Momma Owl every time.

Same with our domesticated or encaged animal frenemies. That recent lioness and antelope video, when analyzed by experts, showed that the lioness was simply playing with the baby antelope just as a housecat plays with a mouse. It can look sweet at times, but it’s really quite cruel and always ends in mangling and death for the mouse or antelope. A tiger and a goat can be buddies in the rarefied environment of a zoo, but that should always be seen as an exception rather than a rule. Our rabbit Ollie can play with the cats while I am there to supervise, but I rely on the fact that Ollie is as big as they are, and can run faster and navigate the small spaces of our house with more agility if she needs to. The cats are well fed and lazy; if they were outside and hungry and saw Ollie streak by, I have no doubt their instincts would kick in and they would chase and kill her.

We all love the thought of the lion lying down with the lamb, and viral videos suggest that it can happen from time to time. And we apparently love to set up unusual conditions in which cross-species “friendships” can occur and then allow ourselves to extrapolate these to visions of world peace. But it’s wise to remember the old story about the girl who found an injured snake and nursed it back to health. The snake bit her, and she died from the venom. The moral of the story? A snake is still a snake.