HASKELL, Texas (AP) - Spring babies are everywhere in West Texas. On the heels of bobcat kittens at Fort Griffin on the old West Texas frontier comes the reappearance of baby owls on the south side of the Haskell County Courthouse.
“Every year, they come back,” said Susan Cockerell, who has worked in the courthouse for a decade.
This year, a clutch of four eggs produced an equivalent number of fluffy, downy, horned owl chicks tucked into the corner of a second-story ledge. Cockerell can look down on them from her desk in the county judge’s office on the floor above.
“I know it’s not the same mom, but it’s the same family,” she told the Abilene Reporter-News (https://bit.ly/1EwbEK5). “They lay their eggs about the first of January in that area and hatch them out. Then they go off, and the next year they come right back to the same place.”
It’s the first time anyone can recall four chicks on the ledge; usually it’s just two. The parents come and go regularly, bringing bits of meat to their young and checking on their welfare. When they aren’t hunting, they usually can be spotted hanging out on the water tower a few blocks over, or elsewhere at the courthouse.
Four owl chicks, plus the parents, qualifies as a group and as with other animals, a grouping of owls has its own unique name - a parliament. Mythology considered the owl to be a wise bird, exemplified by Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom whose symbol was the owl and who often was depicted with one of the birds by her side.
Though opinions may vary, a parliament theoretically is filled with wise and learned people, hence the name for a group of owls. It’s fitting then, that they chose a courthouse as the place to bear their young.
You may draw your own conclusions, however, over the term origins regarding a murder of crows, a mob of emus, a troubling of goldfish or a rhumba of rattlesnakes.
Donna Weise’s desk in the district attorney’s office sits right across from the owls’ nest. Usually she keeps the blinds drawn to prevent the glare from the afternoon sun from obscuring her computer screen.
On occasion, she might leave her blinds open after checking on the chicks and then walking away. But if Mom shows up, it’s not long until Weise notices something just doesn’t feel right.
“She gives you that evil eye,” Weise said. “Their sense of hearing is unbelievable.”
Cockerell laughed.
“She does - you just glance over without even touching anything, and she’s looking right straight at you,” she said. “She’s just giving you that eye.”
The far side of the ledge near the nest is a veritable crime scene of missing critters. Justice of the Peace Lynn Ward Dodson, whose office is on the other side of the building but still has a south-facing window, said there’s a lot of DNA over there.
She’s seen the owl parents in action.
“We’ve watched them swoop down and hit dogs crossing the lawn,” she said. “It was bad enough one time that the dog’s hair on its backside was fluffed up.”
Weise’s voice took on an air of contemplation.
“Yeah, but think about it. We don’t have a lot of dogs running around, do we?” she asked.
“Not anymore,” Cockerell answered. “And we used to have cats, but not anymore.”
“And we used to have a real bad problem with pigeons,” Dodson recalled.
“Not anymore,” Weise said.
“And the kittens that were born underneath the courthouse,” Dodson added.
“Not anymore,” chimed all three.
Thankfully, small children still are safe, though adults might get a warning swoop. Cockerell reported that a groundskeeper around the courthouse has experienced her own close encounters.
“She can be just walking around and one of them will fly not very far from her head, and she says it just scares her to death,” Cockerell said. “And then they just go on; they don’t bother her anymore.”
The owls are popular, not just in the courthouse but around town. Folks like to drop by and see how they’re doing, especially when the chicks start taking to the air.
“They all get their feathers at different times,” Cockerell said. “They kind of ’ooch’ to the edge of the ledge, they’ll look like they’re gonna go, and then they’ll back off.”
“Last year, didn’t the last baby fly off and hit the window to the Chinese restaurant over there?” Weise asked, gesturing across the street. Cockerell nodded.
“One year, we had one who left, and it dropped down on the air-conditioning unit and stayed for a while outside of the county clerk’s office,” Dodson recalled. “And then it hung out for a long time in the flower beds.”
The young bird only stayed there for the day, though.
“We would come out here and check on it ever so often,” Dodson said. “You’d get up next to it, and it would get its feathers up and then hiss. We came back out after work and looked - it was gone.”
Gone until the next year, that is, when the feathered parliament reconvened.
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Information from: Abilene Reporter-News, https://www.reporternews.com
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