Baby Owls in Central Park

After an hour of walking through North Central Park, craning my neck upward to search in the trees; and after the group leader lent me his binoculars, I finally saw two baby screech owls perched high up in the trees above our heads.

Just as Bob, the bird watch leader, had promised, the fluffy baby owls made exaggerated movements of their heads. Since the owls can't move their eyes, they move their entire head to see what's around them and to approximate what's directly in front of them. And so the awkard little baby owls started stretched up tall, and while keeping the faces directed at us, swung their necks down and around in a clockwise motion. Up high....swoop around down low, and up high again...not unlike the motion of the Egg Scrambler at Country Days when I was a kid.

It was dusk, and I was witnessing a little bit of magic. I wouldn't wander solo in the park at night, but we were a large group of maybe fifteen or twenty people, and we stood watching the little owls until the sun went so low that we could no longer see their profiles in the trees.