About one week old. Stacey O’Brien.
At Caltech, the scientists had discovered that owls hunt by the sound of their prey—not with echolocation like bats, but from homing in on the tiny noises that the prey animals make, triangulating the mouse’s location with their ears. When we humans enter a forest, we primarily use our sight to navigate through the trees around us. By contrast, even though owls’ night vision is keen, their primary sense is auditory. Every barn owl has a “sound picture” of the cacophony of noises within the forest, including those made by animals, leaves blowing across the ground, and wind moving through the trees. A barn owl’s satellite dish–shaped face focuses and receives the sounds, directing them to its ears. Unlike human ears, which are in the same place on each side of the head, owls’ ears are irregularly placed. One ear is high up on the head and the other is lower, so that the owl can triangulate the location of a sound much more accurately than a human can. The owl brain’s large cortex is dedicated to auditory processing in much the way that ours has evolved for visual mapping, so it creates an auditory map of his world. As a result, a barn owl can accurately locate a mouse under three feet of snow by homing in on only the heartbeat, and can hear its footsteps from extremely far away.
Knowing all this, I talked to Wesley constantly while his eyes were still shut so that, when his eyes opened, he would have already bonded to my voice. The same dynamic would occur in the nest, where the baby owl would hear his parents communicating with each other while he was in the egg. When Wesley opened his eyes for the first time, he stared right at me.
“Hello, Wesley,” I said.
“Screeeeech,” he hoarsely and softly replied, gazing deeply into my eyes.
Like all barn owls, Wesley had two sets of eyelids: the nictitating membrane, which was sky blue, underneath his regular eyelid, which was pink and had perfect white lashes, which are actually tiny feathers. If I had been a real owl mother, this interaction would have been similar. In the nest, owl mothers twitter and chirp to their babies even while the owlets are still in the egg, shortly before they hatch. When the babies’ eyes open, they make eye contact with their parents and siblings as they chirrup to each other. The owlets are especially intense with eye contact when they are begging for food or lobbying for their mother’s attention. Wesley focused on me right away, twittering and chattering, looking me in the eyes and trying to communicate. I was astonished at the intensity and clarity of his focus on me.
Wesley’s eyes were a deep, inscrutable black. Even when they first opened, they harbored a great mystery and held my gaze. Looking into his eyes was like looking into infinity, into something far away and cosmic. It was a profoundly spiritual experience—I never tired of it—and I was often startled by his eyes’ wildness and depth. Many other people noticed this quality throughout Wesley’s life and struggled to describe the strong conscious personality that they detected behind those eyes.
As with all owls, Wesley’s eyes were fixed in their sockets, so the only way he could get depth perception was to move his head from side to side. He also had an extremely long, thin neck under all that white down, and could contort his head in dozens of different ways, including turning it a little more than 180 degrees—that disconcerting, spooky habit for which owls are known. In the wild, owls can sit comfortably with their heads facing backwards, watching for both predators and prey without so much as lifting a foot. When he was still white and downy, Wesley would sometimes freak me out when I’d realize that he was facing me over his back. Even though it’s completely natural, it seems unnatural, even supernatural, like a scene from The Exorcist. “Wesley,” I’d tell him, “don’t scare me like that!”
Wesley observed the cardinal owl rule of never pooping in his nest. From the beginning, owls are very persnickety about hygiene, and Wesley scooted backwards until his bottom was as far as possible over the edge of the “nest” I’d made for him before pooping. Whe