At night in the San Gabriels, venturing into the world of the owls
The wind whooshed through the alders, the stars pressed down and the International Space Station swung by on its 90-minute loop around the Earth. Lance Benner snapped speakers to his iPod with a rubber band and pointed the contraption at the trees, emitting a “Toot .... toot .... toot.” In the distance, three baby owls hissed in response, “Tsst .... tsst .... tsst.”
It was half-past 9 p.m. on a Thursday, and Benner, his girlfriend, Kathi Ellsworth, and I were high up in the San Gabriel Mountains on an owling expedition.
Owls are the glamour-pusses of the bird-watching world. Some swivel their heads 270 degrees, “Exorcist”-style. Their eyes lap up light; their flight is silent. In Japan, they are worshiped as gods, and in Tanzania, they are feared as omens of death, Benner said. Yet they’re so cute. Teen girls claim them as totems.
One of the marvels of living in Los Angeles is how easy it is to bridge the urban-wilderness divide. Los Angeles County, with its cactus-to-clouds habitat shifts, has an enormous variety of birds. Within an hour of the well-kept homes of La Cañada Flintridge, Benner, who leads owling trips for the Pasadena Audubon Society, had located eight owl species in June alone. All I had to do was follow his trail for a world-class look at the elusive species.
Birding in general never appealed to me. Peering through clunky binoculars? Compiling a life list of species? I don’t have the patience. And I don’t care about “collections.” When my parents gave me a coin collection, I pried the shiny dimes out of their little cardboard slots to buy comic books.
But owling with Benner, an asteroid scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Ellsworth, a clinical microbiologist, was different. In the birding community, people whose interest in birds does not extend past listing them are known as “tickers.”
Benner and Ellsworth, however, have spent years immersing themselves in the mysterious netherworld of the owl, uncovering new information about species, habitats and migratory patterns. They post regularly to an online catalog of birding observations called eBird that’s used by scientists as well as amateurs. They are scientists by day — and scientists by night.