A journey ends, but the cycle continues

Irene Virag | GARDENING

March 14, 2004

It is a year since I began this journey into the natural world that lives around us. That defines itself in an everlasting cycle. Or as I have always thought of it - the cycle of the seasons.

Winter ebbs, spring hovers. Even as we bundle up against the cold, the earth warms. Islands of grass reappear in the retreating snow, and ice loosens its gray-white grip on ponds and inlets. I look for other signs of change.

Almost 13 months ago, I began my journey searching for spring in the guise of a life form that creates its own heat and melts the ice around it. I hiked through Connetquot River State Park Preserve and found my totems of tomorrow - the chunky chartreuse tips of skunk cabbage poking out of the snow and sphagnum moss in a red maple swamp.

Now as winter begins another curtain call, I'm looking for another sign of nature's immutable and quite marvelous cycle. I'm at Bethpage State Park, famous as a center for a species of beings that whack little round balls with clubs and often barely notice what's going on in what they call the rough. I'm in the woods along the Red Course, but I'm not looking for golf balls - not even the errant orange one nestled next to a tree. I have loftier goals. I'm seeking great horned owls.

Irene Virag Bio | E-mail | Recent columns

"She's there," my guide says. "She's in the nest. Look at her sitting like a big queen. She's got a 4 1/2- to 5-foot wingspan and talons that could kill."

My guide smiles. His name is Jim Jones, and during the week he teaches science at Port Washington High School. On weekends in the morning and sometimes at night, he comes to this park where wild things go about their business in the midst of suburbia. It is his avocation to check on owls and red-tailed hawks and eastern bluebirds. He's in love with nature, and why not? Even when it's imperfect, nature rarely disappoints.

I share his exuberance as I spot the dark tufts of the owl's ears rising out of the big stick nest in a white pine. It is a squatter's paradise - high and mighty. Great horned owls don't build their own nests. At Bethpage, they raise their young in domiciles constructed of tar paper, chicken wire and sticks by Jim's students or nests left vacant by red-tailed hawks. The owls move in at the beginning of January - parents and children are gone by the time the hawks establish occupancy in March. For the most part, the two raptors share the skies over Bethpage without much screaming. They eat the same food - rats and mice and robins and rabbits, but the hawks hunt by day and the owls by night.

"Where's the male?" I ask.

"He's somewhere nearby," Jim says. "He's always in attendance. They're good parents. There's always food on the nest."

As well as evidence of it on the ground. Jim points out hairy pellets not far from the nest. Owls swallow their prey whole and not everything gets digested. He hands me a pellet. Nature study, I think, as I examine the shreds of yellowed rat bones and even a jaw and lower teeth. When the owlets hatch, there's no Gerber's for them. "Sometimes, the parents rip up the prey and bring pieces to the babies," Jim says.

A cherry picker truck has arrived, and the mother owl looms larger in the nest. The truck makes her restive. "There she goes," Jim yells. Suddenly and with unbelievable speed, the great creature takes off and sweeps through the trees.

Minutes later, I'm 50 feet up in the bucket of a cherry picker looking at two white eggs the size of ping-pong balls deep in the nest. The cycle of the seasons, I think. The survival of the species. Soon, living creatures should emerge from the shells. A few years ago, baby owls hopping across a fairway caused consternation. "What are those things?" a golfer asked.

There is more to see. For the first time ever, Jim says, there are two nesting great horned owl mothers at Bethpage. We journey to a spot off the Black Course to view the second.

"Hi, Mom," Jim says as he sets up a large scope. "How you doing, gorgeous? Look at those yellow eyes."

Even with the naked eye, I see her head rising from the nest high in a pitch pine. Then I peer through the scope.

"She's looking at us," Jim says.

Her face is almost a circle with feathers in shades of brown and black. Her tufted ears stand straight up. Her affect is proud, and, yes, wise - as if she senses the relative unimportance of a wingless creature peering at her through a tube.

Nor is she disturbed by the cherry picker or by the photographer ascending on her right. But she turns to watch - she is, after all, a hunter who can swivel her head 270 degrees - and stares at him. I wonder if a camera is clicking in the owl's consciousness. I wonder who is recording whom.

Hawks wheel in the noontime sky. The woods are silent. As we leave, I look back at the owl. It is important to look, I think. Whether we're studying ants on our patios or clambering into cherry pickers or, like some of my colleagues, diving in shark cages or observing the bottom of the sea through submarine ports, we should be looking.

Like Jim Jones says about his students: "It's one thing for kids to see owls in books, it's another to really see them, to see them in their nests. You have to see nature to love it."

And if we care about this world we share with countless other creatures, we should love nature. Even here in the suburbs, where sometimes we have to search for it. That's what this series has been all about.