Life Can Be a Hoot Sometimes

“Big wind last night, eh!” remarked Grandpa.

“Whoa! You’re not kidding,” answered Brady, “it blew down those two giant poplars at the south-west corner of the yard.”

“Really? That’s too bad. Those have been there since I was your age,” said Grandpa.

“So they’d be like 100 years old or so then,” Brady joked.

"Don’t make me chase you down like a rabid skunk, you little smart ass!” replied Grandpa while making a sudden lunge toward his 20-year-old grandson. Then they both laughed.

“I guess I should go out there with the three-ton and the chainsaw and chop them up,” declared Brady.

“Do you need a supervisor, to keep you out of trouble?” asked Grandpa.

“Sure,” Brady replied, “maybe I should supervise and you can chop and haul.” They both laughed again and headed for the big grain truck.

When the two of them got to the corner of the yard, it was apparent that there had been a bit more damage done by the wind than had first met the eye. One of the poplar trees had fallen onto the roof of an old out-building, barely standing, also at the back corner of the yard.

“I guess I should finish off this old grain bin too, while I’m at it. The wood’s not much good in it anymore. It might be easier to just burn it down. The poplars are pretty old too. A lot of dead branches on them. Maybe I should just cut up the trees and throw them in one big pile inside the bin and burn the whole mess at once,” stated Brady.

“You’re sure a heck of a lot smarter than you look,” added Grandpa.

“Thanks Grandpa. That means so much, coming from you,” chuckled Brady.

Brady fired up the chainsaw, and while he worked away at cutting up the two old poplar trees into manageably-sized logs, Grandpa wandered into the old grain bin. The bin was still partially standing and there was now a pretty fair-sized hole in its roof, left by one of the main poplar branches that had fallen on it during last night’s big blow. The sunlight shone in through the hole, enabling Grandpa, even with his failing eyesight to look around quite effortlessly inside. He kicked away at some old debris and then he noticed that a bird’s nest of some sort had either fallen from the tree, the rafters, or had simply been damaged where it lay on the soft, rotted wooden floor of the bin. The eggs in the nest had scattered out and most were at best, scrambled on the floor.

There appeared to have been anywhere from six to twelve of them. All were broken except for two. From the look of the exposed yolks and other contents of the eggs, the damage had been done fairly recently – most likely during last night’s storm. Grandpa stooped down to take a closer look at the eggs. They were about the same color and size as a regular chicken egg and the shells, indeed, seemed to be in tact. He wasn’t sure what kind of bird had laid them and neither did he know if the nest had fallen or if it had been built on the floor to begin with. Nevertheless, he picked them up and took them outside to show his grandson Brady. Brady stopped his cutting and examined his grandpa’s find.

“Well, there’s only one way to know for sure what kind of bird laid these eggs,” declared Brady.

“And, what is that exactly?” inquired Grandpa.

“You’ll just have to sit on them for a couple of weeks, until they hatch.”

The two of them laughed at the thought of Grandpa acting like an old mother hen to hatch some eggs.

“But seriously though,” continued Brady, “we’ve got a couple of old hens in the ‘clucker’ house right now and, they’d probably love to have eggs of some sort, to look after for the next week or so. Why don’t you put those two eggs in their nest with a few of the fertilized chicken eggs from the brooder house and let them play around with them and see what happens?”

Grandpa smiled a big smile at the brilliance of Brady’s idea and assured his grandson that he had obviously inherited his brains and intelligence from grandpa’s side of the family. Grandpa carefully put the eggs into his denim smock pocket and trudged back through the trees surrounding the farmyard, straight toward the chicken brooder house. Once there, he opened the door and tip-toed to the brood nest and pilfered four more warm chicken eggs from the underside of two of the mother hens. He carefully added the new eggs to the ones already in his pocket. Next stop was the clucker house, where he found two old hens searching aimlessly around the floor for some eggs of their own, to care for.

“I’ve got just the ticket here for you girls,” Grandpa said as he greeted the two hens.

He took two of the chicken eggs and one of the unknown eggs and put them in a group at one end of the nest stoop. He did the same with the remaining eggs at the other end of the stoop. Then he bent over and grabbed one of the hens and lifted her into the nest near one end. The chicken clucked in surprise and scratched at the three eggs nearest her. She circled the eggs a few times, then rolled them instinctively with her beak, ruffled her soft breast and belly feathers and lowered herself carefully onto the three eggs. Grandpa repeated the exercise with the other hen and the remaining three eggs at the other end of the nest compartment. The next hen took to her new eggs even quicker and more affectionately than the first. Grandpa felt like a little kid now – waiting for Christmas morning to roll around. The only problem was that the calendar was still unfortunately stuck on the first day of June. He left the clucker house and quietly closed the door behind him.

In the week that followed, Grandpa and Brady both checked regularly, the unhatched eggs buried under the warm caring bodies of the two clucker hens. Days and days passed with nothing to report and then, one morning grandpa opened the hen house door to the sound of peep, peep peeping noises coming from the nest stoop. He opened the lid and sure enough, there were two little chicks snuggled up to their surrogate mother on one end of the stoop.

Grandpa knew that there would soon be other arrivals. He made his rounds for the rest of the day on pretty much an hourly basis. At around 4:00 o’clock that afternoon, he entered the clucker house and was greeted with not only peep, peep peeping but also with a most unchicken-like sound coming from the nest. He opened the nest lid to investigate the source of the novel sound. And there, before him was perhaps the homeliest, oddest looking baby bird he had ever laid eyes upon. All he knew for certain, was that it was NOT a chicken. He ran out to get his grandson Brady, to share the news of the farm’s newest arrival.

When Brady arrived on the scene, the two men stared in amazement at the new hatchling.

“I think it’s a space alien or something, from another planet,” declared Brady to his grandfather.

“Sounds about right,” answered Grandpa. He then asked more seriously, “What do you suppose it is?”

Brady replied, “Judging by the bend in his beak, he’s probably a hunter and a meat-eater of some sort – like a hawk or a falcon or something.” Brady went on, “If the eggs came from that broken tree, it could be a hawk, I suppose – I don’t know whether a hawk would nest up there or not. The eggs might have already been in that old grain bin though and the tree broke them when it fell through the roof. In which case, I don’t know what sort of bird it would be. I think falcons nest in old buildings like that. I guess we’ll just have to let it grow a little to see what shape it takes.”

Grandpa reached into the open stoop and slipped his hand under the strange bird’s body, lifting it up to eye level to make a closer inspection of the farm’s latest arrival. It didn’t have a lot of down, like a baby chick has. Both Brady and his grandpa reckoned that it would have to stay pretty close to the mother hen, to keep warm, at least until it grew some sort of plumage of its own.

Grandpa put the new bird back in the stoop near to the mother hen. She lifted her wing and ruffled her feathers a bit to accept her youngest into the warmth of her body. The men then examined the second hen’s little clutch of birds. Two additional chicks peeped loudly from this clutch when they lifted the hen’s wings. To their dismay, the second mystery egg had cracked open and had already started to dry out. The mother hen must have kicked it out of the nest earlier in the day, further indicating that it was no longer viable. Whatever had been inside, if anything at all, was no doubt dead. So, Brady picked up the egg to take a closer look. He chipped away part of the broken shell, revealing a partially dried bird inside. It looked only slightly less ugly than its very-much-alive sibling in the other clutch.

Brady asked his grandfather, “Isn’t your friend, Ralph, up the highway, a birder or something like that?”

“Yeh, something like that. I think he dabbles in crows and robins and magpies mostly,” replied Grandpa.

“Maybe we should take this dead egg over to him and see if he knows what kind of bird it was,” added Brady.

“I guess it wouldn’t hurt. I haven’t talked to old Ralph in while. If nothing else, I guess I could get a bit of a visit in.” Grandpa continued, “You got time to go over right now, or do you want to wait until later?”

Brady moved past his grandfather toward the clucker-house door and spoke, “No, we’d better go right now. This little egg is going to dry out pretty fast, and maybe start to stink in a hurry. Ralph needs to look at it soon before it becomes a rock-hard little raisin.”

The two men walked purposefully toward Brady’s pick-up truck, hopped in and drove out of the yard. In fifteen minutes, they arrived at Ralph Peterson’s – amateur ornithologist. They got out of the truck and were greeted by Ralph’s three dogs. Brady held the egg in his hand, up over his head, to protect it from the curious trio. At least two of them were sure that Brady had brought them food, so they jumped and danced and wagged their energetic little, farm-dog tails in great anticipation of the tasty treat they were, no doubt soon to be awarded. Disappointedly though, they begrudgingly returned to their regular duties of vigilance and lolly-gagging, as their human appeared at the front door of the house and invited Brady and his grandfather inside.

“Well, well, well Ralph, long time no see,” Grandpa exclaimed in a jovial greeting. “We brought you some lunch.”

“You were always a thoughtful son-of-a-bitch, weren’t you Morgan. What’d you bring me?” questioned Ralph.

“We brought you an egg, and it’s got a bird in it, and the bird appears to be dead, and we were wondering – my grandson Brady and I – if you might be able to perform some sort of artificial resuscitation on the poor little thing and bring it back to life?” Grandpa snickered as Brady held the egg out toward Ralph in an outstretched palm.

Ralph replied just as jokingly and with some degree of excitement and enthusiasm, “I’m pretty good with most birds but dead ones usually give me the most trouble, so I don’t know that I’ll be able to help you on that one.”

Grandpa went on, “Well, in that case – ‘Bad Ralph, NO LUNCH!!’" And then, laughter all around. "No seriously, we need your help identifying what kind of bird this might be. We found it in an old bin in the corner of our yard, after that wind that blew through here a few weeks back. Blew down those two big poplars onto the bin. We found the eggs in the bin and we don’t know if they came down with the tree or if they were in the bin to start with. Anyway, we set the eggs under a chicken and one of them hatched out the homeliest excuse for a bird you ever saw and the other one, well, lies there on the table in front of you, dead to the world. What do you think?”

Ralph reached for a magnifying glass from the bookshelf beside the table. He examined the specimen carefully, humming and hawing and surmising and speculating for several minutes.

“Well Doc,” quizzed Grandpa, “What’s your diagnosis? Is it from this planet? Or is it a space alien, as Brady here, suggested it might be earlier?”

“It’s not an alien for sure – we can rule that out,” laughed Ralph. “It’s a carnivorous creature for sure, judging by it’s beak and it’s talons.”

Brady and his grandfather quickly exchanged glances and gave each other a HIGH FIVE.

Ralph went on, “It’s most likely a Barn Owl. They like to nest in old buildings around farms in this area. The old buildings usually have a few rodents kicking around so the owls don’t have to go far to get groceries. They can lay anywhere from three to 18 eggs and all or none of them might hatch depending on how the environment and food supplies are going in that particular season. They are real good barometers for the condition of the planet. Their success is a good commentary on the shape our natural world is in.”

Brady spoke up for the first time, “That is so cool. So, that ugly-looking buzzard back with the mother hen, is actually a Barn Owl? Barn Owls kill chickens too, don’t they?” Isn’t she going to be surprised when her kid wakes her up some morning with a knife and fork in his little claws and then eats her for breakfast?”

Ralph explained further, “Likely that won’t happen. Full-grown chickens are a little large for Barn Owls. Barn Owls don't get too big, so they like their prey a little on the smaller side. And, since your owl is going to be raised by a hen, it probably won’t realize that it is an owl for awhile. So, it will probably end up doing ‘chicken’ sorts of things for the first part of it’s life at least.”

The three men sat around Ralph’s table for a bit. They chatted about birds and owls and crops and the weather for some time. Finally, they had heard all they wanted to hear from each other, about those topics of discussion and they agreed mutually and with very limited spoken protocol, to part ways for the time being.

“Yeh.”

“No.”

“I don’t know.”

“Well.”

“I guess.”

And, as if these were the magic words necessary to break the spell that held them captive at the kitchen table in the first place, they simultaneously rose from their chairs, shuffled to the front door mat, put on their shoes and boots, and headed back outside to the canine clamor previously put on hold. Brady and his grandfather drove home with great excitement and anticipation. They went immediately to the clucker-house to check in on the ‘new bird’ – the Barn Owl. And, there he was. He was still nestled safely next to his ‘mother’ and, in all his scraggly, scruffy glory, still bent on the idea that he was a chicken and with no idea what he would look like tomorrow or the next day. Better not to know the fates and fortunes of one's life, than to see the future, and as a result, become so cautious, as to miss the excitement and adventure that accompanies the unravelling of that life.

In the weeks and months that followed, ‘Barney’ – the newly christened owl-chicken – took on a prominent position in the hierarchy of the barnyard social strata and the underlying politics that held the network together. As he grew in size and age, his scruffy plumage began to fill in – he looked fluffier. He had a more upright body design than his ‘cab forward’ siblings. He wasn’t able to navigate the coordinated diagonal striding system used by his full-chicken brothers and sisters. Instead, to keep up with the rest of the flock, he used a method of locomotion that could more appropriately be described as the ‘hop-flap-flop’ maneuver.

Each time Barney would attempt to ‘walkabout’ with the rest of the family, his efforts to amble would cause such a stir that all of the chickens would scatter and scurry away in fright, leaving Barney in solitude to wonder what the hell everyone was doing, just abandoning him like that, for no reason. Eventually, the crowd would re-gather around big brother, and things would go back to normal for awhile.

Brady and his grandfather, unlike Barney himself, were very aware that Barney was indeed an owl. Whenever they encountered this unlikely chicken wandering about the farmyard, they would pick him up and let him roost on an outstretched forearm or a nearby tree branch or on the top of a fence post. By the time Barney reached his six-week birthday, his face had flattened to a most unchicken-like countenance in which were embedded two of the most attentive dark eyes the chicken clan had ever seen. Compared to the domesticated and complacent stare of a barnyard chicken, Barney’s gaze had the ability to burn a hole right through any piece of old lumber on the premises. Barney was like Superman, come to earth. He developed the ability to hop and flutter to great heights. He could leap tall fences in a single bound and flutter his way onward and upward until finally coming to an apical roost on vehicles or window sills or the tops of huge tractor tires.

Barney soon discovered the surprising mobility afforded by Brady's old skateboard whenever he landed on it by mistake. He also developed quite a relationship with the farm dog, ‘Pigpen’. He would hop onto Pigpen’s back and travel on board his hairy perch around the farm. This practice negated the necessity to any longer deploy his once-famous “hop-flap-flop” to get from place to place through the by-ways of the barnyard. Grandpa and Brady figured that flying was probably not too far off. It wouldn’t be long before Barney would hop up to some lofty landing and then take the notion to swoop off and into the wild blue yonder. And, at last, and much too soon for the liking of Brady and his grandfather and the rest of Barney’s brothers and sisters and foster parents and friends left stranded on the ground, he finally made the leap to realize his potential. He hopped his way to the top branch of one of the remaining poplar trees in the yard.

Within minutes of reaching the penthouse branch, his wings hunched up at the shoulders and he fell toward the ground. In a millisecond his comparatively enormous wings spread outward to their entire breadth and he lifted miraculously and effortlessly into the brisk west wind. The flapping that followed appeared so very much simpler and more efficient than the complex maneuvers he had previously deployed to get around as a terrestrial beast. He never ventured far from the farmyard though, and would very often come back to earth to check in with friends and foster family still tethered to the realities of ‘chickendom’. Although these were still the main 'significant-other' birds in Barney’s life, there were now several new Barn Owls frequenting the trees in the grove surrounding the farm yard. Barney’s presence had indeed initiated an influx of owls to the point of ‘parliamentary proportions’ – if you catch my drift!

Later that summer, Brady contemplated tearing down the last remaining outbuilding in the yard. He climbed through the top window in the bin to examine it’s interior condition. When he lowered himself to the floor and after his eyes had adjusted to the dimmer light within, he was surprised to see that he was not alone inside the shed. There, on a layer of earth and mouse poop covered with an old blanket with a modest adornment of dried grass and straw, sat a familiar creature, wings cocked outward and partially covering a clutch of at least 10 white eggs. Brady looked for a second, then hoisted himself out of the bin. He jumped to the ground and walked over to where his grandfather was hoeing some weeds in the garden.

His grandfather then inquired, “So, are you going to tear it down and burn it?”

Brady answered, “No, I think I’ll let it stand for at least the rest of this year – maybe longer.” And then he added, “Oh, and by the way – you know how we haven’t seen the owl around so much in the last little while – well, I figured out ‘why.’”

“And why is that?” quizzed Grandpa.

Brady looked around, as if finally understanding how the cycle of weird events and life on earth continues, and ended the conversation by noting, “Let’s just say, we should think about renaming ‘Barney’ something a little more feminine – like ‘Barnita’ or ‘Bernice’ maybe.”

Brady grinned. His grandfather chuckled a little. They gave each other a ‘High Five’ and went back to work and their farm-life, thinking about crops and weather and chickens and, of course, Barn Owls.