I am writing 100 How-To essays. It is a big project. Here is why I am doing it. This is essay 37 of 100.
There have been a few pretty warm days this December. The day after Christmas I saw two girls wearing SLEEVELESS shirts — like, seven-year-old girls! — as they FROLICKED along the sidewalk. The tell-tale green fingers of the crocuses outside our neighbors’ yard peeked out all, “Wait, is it spring ALREADY?” The bank teller two days before hummed along to “Jingle Bell Rock” and then interrupted herself to say, “But I don’t feel like it’s Christmas when I go outside; the weather isn’t Christmas.” I told her I wasn’t going to complain about the weather on any day when I didn’t have to wear a hat. The bank teller reminded me that I WAS wearing a hat. I said that it was hard to trust something like sixty degrees in December, and also I look so good in hats.
Birds are smarter than crocuses and mostly don’t come back to Chicago just because it’s warm outside. I am a person who likes to watch birds. In the winter, on the Illinois birding Facebook groups (maybe the loveliest and purest of all the Facebook groups on earth, where people post photos and descriptions of birds each ranging wildly in quality, and the group unanimously says congratulations), the images are all of owls right now. Owls hang around in the winter; it’s a great season for them. I get it; we have probably 16 rats living in our back yard and they have no inhibitions when they’re cold and hungry. But it is still hard to see an owl. You kind of have to know where one is. It’s rare to happen upon one just by accident.
Not accidentally, by the way, Luke and I saw an owl this winter. We signed up to go on an “owl prowl.” I don’t get tired of telling people this, and 90 percent of that is because I find the “owl” rhymes to be among the most satisfying to say: owl, towel, prowl, scowl, dowel, etc. I am a sucker for a word that isn’t positive how many syllables it has.
We drove out to the southwestern-most part of the city — you could see Indiana just right over there — and met up with Edward and three other people enthusiastic about owls. Edward was leading the walk. I imagined Edward was going to be 68, based on his name being Edward, but he was actually maybe a little younger than me — and he told us at the beginning that he’d been leading owl prowls for I think 15 years, which means he was a very cool teen.
Here are facts we learned about the presumed effectiveness of finding owls using a speaker and an iPhone app:
Stand as a group in a circle so you don’t have to move your head. This is ironic, because owls are famously so good at moving their heads. Humans are clumsy and loud at it.
When playing the owl sounds, begin with the smallest owl — this is the saw whet owl if you’re in Illinois — and then gradually move onto bigger owls. This is because a bigger owl might be interested in eating a saw whet owl, and might turn up to the party for a snack; if you play the big owl sound first, though, the little owls won’t go anywhere near you, no matter what you do.
Owls all sound SO DIFFERENT and they have tons of different sounds they make! The screech owl sounds like the ghost of a horse.
On the owl prowl, we at first saw nothing. It was spooky to be out in the woods seeing nothing. There was a ghosty silver lake sending up pillows of steam and slim, angular suggestions of trees. The path itself was nothing surrounded by nothing and everything felt grayer than gray.
At the end of the “path,” we reached the most horror movie-y place of all: a clearing separating Illinois from Indiana across which all the power lines snaked the sky. You could hear the electricity purring like a wicked animal. Since the woods are surrounded by highways on either side, and a clearing is not a woods, there were suddenly distant streams of cars to make themselves known, and streetlights to half-heartedly flood the field; everything turned sickly copper, and the sky went purple where once it was black. This felt like the place to see an owl, because owls and impossible landscapes often coordinate their efforts to be otherworldly. I imagined something massive swooping across the expanse like a scary fallen kite.
But that was not what happened. What happened was that Edward played the owl sounds in succession again — saw whet, saw whet, screech, screech, screech — and on the third screech owl call, we heard the same sound echo behind us. Edward’s face suddenly came quite alive and he pointed at the woods like maybe we hadn’t heard it, or maybe we didn’t believe it and if he pointed he would be confirming that indeed, proof of an owl was nigh. A few people apparently SAW the owl, then, awkward and at eye level, skulking at the edge of the nearby brush. I didn’t see it. Luke thinks he did.
We went back into the woods to play the screech sound more times. I felt like when I was middle school and I sometimes bought singles on CD. Just one song over and over again, until that song was the only sound you could remember existing. This was the ghost-horse noise, by the way; a noise so bizarre and inherently terrifying that it came across as a little silly. We kept hearing the sound repeated by an actual owl deep, deep in the woods.
“I know you guys think the owl’s deep, deep in the woods,” Edward said, “but it’s not. It’s just small and it can’t make loud sounds.” This seemed like it had to be a lie. “In actuality, it’s probably no more than ten or fifteen feet away.” Impossible.
But then, of course, Edward transformed into a birding superhero, expertly moving us in increments across the same little corner of woods, whispering and playing the owl sound with the seriousness of an army operative. And then he whisper-said, “OK, it’s there. It’s right there. I’m going to slowly, slowly move my flashlight to it, and we should be able to see it for just a second. Everyone pay attention.” Everyone but Carol paid attention. He moved the flashlight from the ground upward along the branches of a tree, and then, yes, he was right: ten feet away was a palm-sized blur of gray-and-white feathers, for just a millisecond, before it realized that we were not probably going to be viable mates. “Eastern screech owl,” Edward said triumphantly, like he was twelve and had just conquered his first piano recital.
“I didn’t see it,” said Carol.
This was a big success. It marked my eighth lifetime owl, and my first screech owl. But I’m not expecting to go out and just randomly find some owls on the warm days of winter, you know? Most owls don’t like daylight at all. I mention it because it’s not like I was thinking, “OK, I’ll bet we’ll find an owl” when I agreed to go bird-watching with Luke at Montrose on the first warm day I spent outside this winter.
We saw these things at Montrose that day:
A couple, the girl had a teddy bear, walking barefoot along the lakefront in the sand.
Another couple, the woman had binoculars, walking through the brambles on the trail, who stopped to talk to us. The man had a gray mustache like from a commercial for popcorn, and it really seemed to me like they were probably headed to a nice place to sit to have a bagel. The woman said, “Have you seen an owl?” We said no, but I told her I had on an owl t-shirt, which I did. She asked to see the shirt and I showed it to her. I bought it for its weirdness. The color was something the company had described as “oyster,” and in hot pink it had a screen-printed image of a short-eared owl flying across an open plain. In big letters on top — which you still couldn’t really read because pink doesn’t show up on oyster very well — it said “SHORT EARED OWL” and then had a fact about short eared owls below that. I can’t remember the fact right now. The woman liked my shirt, and told me that she had seen a barred owl here once, but not today. “They’ve thinned it out a lot,” she said, referencing the bird sanctuary. That’s not true, but I get that we sometimes remember things as lusher, and trees seemed more significant when there were owls in them. I told the couple where I got the shirt. The man said, “Actually, that’s quite good to know."
Sparrows .
Black-capped chickadees eating from a feeder someone had rigged from twine and empty cat food containers and hung from a low bough.
Gulls.
Cardinals, and a man who kept thrilling them by tossing them bread. This is bad for cardinals, but it made the man so, so happy to be doing it.
Gulls again.
Geese.
A box built for a bat.
Thistles and milkweed pods.
Robins.
Most of the times we’ve come to the bird sanctuary when it’s wintry, there have been basically ONLY robins. They are stoic, hanging out in scattered groups. They move around a little, and are excellent singers. Years ago, I found that a tree full of robins presented the best opportunity for counting something.
Meditating sitting on a pillow in your living room can be pretty good; or meditating on a chair, also in your living room, can be pretty good. Meditating is hip and in vogue. Mindfulness has really won the day. I’m all for it. I even bought a dumb mindfulness journal with guided activities printed in a non-threatening font that I do sometimes sitting at my desk. I am bad at meditation and at mindfulness, by which I mean I am inconsistent and not great at committing. Mindfulness is like someone I matched with on Tinder I like well enough, but with whom I don’t often prioritize time, but it’s still working out fine for both of us. Like, we both know that we could have something great if I would show up just a little more, but mindfulness isn’t going anywhere and I don’t feel like beating myself up over my failure to follow the rules. Mindfulness wouldn’t want me to do that, either. Plus, it’s dating, like, a LOT of other people. And so, so many of them are conventionally attractive yoga teachers. Mindfulness doesn’t NEED me. And yet still, the thing we have is better than nothing. You know?
Counting robins is a good mindfulness task fo people who aren’t ready to commit to a daily practice. One of the best. First, you’ll need to find robins, which you can do by listening somewhere where there are trees and/or water. So I guess actually the first step is to find some trees.
Yesterday was another warm day, but it rained. I woke up sad and tried to feel better but could not. (This spirals really fast. “I’m sad.” “Feel better!” “I can’t.” “You’re not trying hard enough!” “ I’m trying as hard as I can.” “Then you’re a failure and you should roll over in a hole.” “THERE ARE NO HOLES NEARBY!” “HOW SAD!!!” If it isn’t clear from the total lack of context here, these are all quotes said by me in conversation with myself.) Going outside usually helps, so I drove to the calendar store at the mall. I bought four calendars. The first was country roosters, the second was herbs and herbal remedies, the third was a daily New Yorker cartoon — the kind you can tear off after the day is over. That’s only three of them.
What’s already clear to you wasn’t immediately clear to me, but I did figure it out: the car and the mall are not adequately “outside” locations. But across the street from the mall is a strip of walkway that lines the river with sculptures all along it, and I’d always wanted to check it out. Partially, if not mostly, this is because it’s a truly weird stretch of land. The walkway and grass and thin thicket of trees separating it from the river are minimal and out-of-place along a giant, four-lane roadway feeding into other giant, four-lane roadways.
There was a parking lot for this walkway, and a sign that said I could walk left to go to the amphitheater and right to go to the disc golf course. I picked amphitheater. There were already two people at the amphitheater, and I walked at a significant distance, so that if I were to stick out my hand to measure them, the people would be each as large as my pinkie finger. They were pouring cups of water from the river onto what appeared to be a brown mound. It flopped over and revealed itself to be a fish. I saw the fishing poles lying on the dockside. I don’t like fishing, but these people seemed so happy to have caught a fish. They wanted it to be wet so the girl could take good pictures of the boy holding the fish. My takeaways were that (1) the Chicago River has HUGE fish, and (2) this was a good day for these two people, and a bad day for me.
So I turned around to walk to the disc golf course. I have been hit by a disc in New Orleans when I was sitting near a disc golf course, and ever since then disc golf has been my sworn enemy. I was alarmed to see that there were, indeed, four people actively playing disc golf in the near dark of this non-park on a Sunday in December. But soon I was distracted because I heard the chuckling sounds of what could only be a tree full of robins.
“Of course!” I thought, “I am near all these trees! It’s winter! Robins are here, too!” And that will usually be the case; if you’re near a lot of trees in winter, robins can’t be too far away. So I sat and I counted them.
One of the reasons this task is so wonderful for grounding oneself in the present is that the robins don’t stay still. You stay still, and they hop around unpredictably, so you can’t ever be sure whether you already counted that one or not. This means you have to start over again and again. I recommend counting them slowly. Consider each robin. Wonder about where it is going to sleep, and if it is friends with any of the other robins, and silently congratulate it for being a member of a species that thrives in a horrible city with horrible humans. Congratulate it for waking up every morning BEFORE DAWN so it can survive and eat worms and breed with other robins. Congratulate it for making it through the winter. You and the robin have that in common, and don’t forget: this is no small feat.
Coming back to the present moment is scientifically proven to ease mind-spirals (see above). I think there were twelve robins. I felt a lot better.
The fourth calendar was owls. It’s just for me. They remind me that there is always the possibility of magic.