You know, we do live out… out in the middle of the countryside here. And there's woods all around us, and so forth. And… and we get a good many kinds of wildlife. The first night that we were moving in, out here, it was the middle of January because I was starting a semester teaching at Syracuse — the semester, the winter semester —and we were carrying boxes and stuff into the house. And all of a sudden, a great horned owl spoke from the edge of the… from the hedgerow right over there. And I… I guess it sort of became our… our — what would you call it — totem, or something of that sort. We could… we could watch that nest until… until the leaves got up. And… and we would watch the mother over there in the early morning sort of doing her nest work and tearing up fish and stuff. They… they lived especially on fish from the lake down below there. And… and we would watch them. And we watched them go out to… to hunt every… every night. Or we would hear them, by then it was dark. They… they would go out around 11 or so and then always… you know, I… I said that we were moving in right… right in January and just in the dead of winter. That's when the male's voice takes on tremendous resonance. He's much smaller. He's not nearly as fierce as the females. I'm told that happens in certain species. But the… but he… but he… he speaks first, and bigger. And… and it's five notes called, hoo hoohoo hoo hoo. And then there's a pause. And then she answers about a fourth higher — from across the field, probably — hoo hoohoo hoo hoo, which probably only proves that winter nights here are so bad that not even an owl would go out by himself. They always travel together, and they come back about four o’clock. And, now that nest, we got to… we had the babies for about two weeks when the nest came down in a storm.

The next year, I had a baby. The… the local post master is the wild bird man here. And he called up and says, 'I've got a baby owl, and you can have it if you'll… you’ll… but you'll have to… to go out and get a lot of dead things for it to eat, drive around the back woods and pick up all the dead stuff off the highway.' And he says, 'Then you'll have to teach it to fly and to hunt'. And… and I remember certain of my friends really got very nervous when… when we would go together into… into the cabin where I was keeping it.