This is Thursday April 24, 2025 Exclamation Mark

 

It was six o’clock in the morning. I had just gotten up from bed when I saw an unknown object that my brain didn’t recognize as flora or fauna amid the grass in the creek basin. It looked more like an out-of-place  exclamation mark sitting on an upright stick, so I grabbed up the binoculars to see it more clearly. Aha! It was a Strix nebulosa! 

Looked like an exclamation mark from a distance.

 

I had never seen an owl sitting there before, but it made sense; what a perfect place to hunt for food.

Through the telephoto lens of our camera, I saw a dark-colored animal on the opposite bank, behind the owl, that leapt up from the waters edge as though as surprised to find an owl sitting there that morning as I was. It could have been a large mink or weasel, but it moved too fast for me to make positive identification. I suspect it suddenly felt endangered and skedattled before it could experience the owl's talons in its back. I had doubted a Strix nebulosa would eat something as big as that but this site educated me.

 

I took several images, from the doorway of our walk-out basement, but even with the camera's motion stabilization feature and the low-light of the morning, shooting a long-range telephoto shot free-handed isn’t consistently vivid. As luck would have it, I saw it look behind itself, then flinch as though readying to fly — and did. 

 

I lost sight of it through the fine tree branches on ‘Birch Point,’ but 'Hmmm' I never saw it leave the basin.

Temps hovering around 35 degrees, I slipped on a pair of boots, grabbed my jacket, my cap, and quietly closed the door behind me, and began heading for the birch trees some distance away when a Canadian goose came ‘hronking’ noisily around a bend of the creek below where the owl had taken flight. It may have been that this goose had prompted his departure, except that surely the owl had seen it approaching from downstream. 

 

   I left open the possibility the owl may have seen a mouse and had flown into the tall grass there to grab it.I hoped I could get an image of it there unaware of me. I looked for the owl to no avail. Where was it?

Classically, watching me from its advantage point in the birch trees.