Subterranean Neighbors

It occurred to me that I haven't talked about my neighbors on the Rumba. They live in the hole next door.  Here is one of them on his front porch:

Sometimes, when I wake up in the middle of the night I can hear them. They circle the house and scream in the darkness. It drives the cat crazy, as you can imagine.

Occasionally when it rains, they drop by my front porch (where they are always welcome) and say hello.

Once when I let my dog out in the front yard at night, one of them swept down from atop my mailbox and screeched at him. It was probably just reminding us that I was violating our county's leash laws.

I don't let the dog out front any more at night, which I think is pretty nice of me. I wish they'd reciprocate by using somewhere other than my mailbox to defecate.

Some folks only know how to take.

As I was writing this blog, I discovered that they're being evicted. Apparently the vacant lot isn't going to be vacant anymore. My other neighbors--the human ones--informed me that a team is coming out in June to humanely move them out of their burrows.

So instead of being a happy post, apparently it's going to be a bitter-sweet tribute to them (you know, one of ecological eulogies).

I am going to miss these little guys. South Florida, as I like to say, is an asphalt prison. The sprawl just crushes you. I am a guy who grew up playing manhunt in overgrown orange groves. I remember gleefully scratching my legs up, pushing through razor-edged palmettos to get at the very best blackberry patches. A day was wasted if I didn't come home bleeding and filthy and covered in sweat.

Don't get me wrong--South Florida has tried very hard to have good parks. But those parks, manicured lawns with a background din of car-horns, just can't compare to the oak hammocks, pine uplands, and cypress sloughs of my childhood. I think it's great that the neighborhood kids have safe places to play basketball and tennis. But they're not for me.

Those little owls have been a reminder that Nature is still out there somewhere. The oddest part is that, the species as a whole is a lot like me. Apparently they are largely from the central region of Florida. Development pushed them south where they learned to live in the spaces around canals (and the occasional vacant lot). Like me, they were driven here by circumstance.

I've watched the same family of owls for almost three years now. Every year I see the pair of them come and have children. Or maybe I'm seeing their kids, I don't know. What I do know is that this last year, they had five babies and all of them survived to adulthood, which I thought was pretty amazing. One day I woke up and there were all these feathered golf balls hopping around the entrance to their burrow. Fast forward a few months and the field is now alive with owls. The babies have grown up and dug new burrows all over the field. As I said earlier in the post, at night I can hear them circling my house, marking their territory with eerie cries in the dark. I make it a point to watch for owls when I drive around and I have never seen this many in one area before.

I suppose I should be thankful I got to see them at all. And happy that they prospered and will be removed humanely. But I can't shake the feeling that this is a loss.

Probably because that is exactly what it is.

(click the pic to enlarge)






*I wonder if our culture had encountered burrowing owls first if we would call the other kind "tree owls."