August 21, 2014
Elf Owl in sycamore
Elf Owl in sycamore

We’re in Madera Canyon, standing on the edge of darkness.  Desert nightfall envelops us like black velvet, a tight, warm cocoon in which hearing and vision seem intensified even as sound and light dissipate and fade away.  Then far out across the Santa Cruz valley lightning illuminates the peaks of the Baboquivaris, too distant for us to hear the attendant rumble of thunder, enhancing the eerie feeling of detachment from the physical world.

Reality returns as our ears realize the gurgling of the creek intruding upon the thick silence, tumbling over rocks and roots on its downward journey toward the Santa Cruz.  The nightly cricket chorus begins.  Up along the trail leaves stir, aurally marking the passage of some foraging denizen of the dark.  Down canyon a Poorwill sounds off, heavy accent on the second syllable of its onomatopoeic name giving the call three syllables.  Tree forms take shape against starlight.  We speak in whispers dictated solely by the mood of nighttime in the wild.

Finally we hear it, across the creek and downslope.  Six syllables, accent on the third and fourth, falling off at the end.  Soft at first, then rising and sharper, perhaps as the singer of the song emerges from his day roost in sycamore or saguaro or from the nest cavity he is advertising to a potential mate.  The chatter song.  The most complex and most often heard song of Micrathene whitneyi, Elf Owl.  We slip and slosh across the creek, following the aural trail.

He is in a sycamore.  He is the world’s smallest owl, less than six inches.  He is smaller than some sparrows!  He is highly migratory, appearing in Arizona from the third week of March through mid-September, and he has just returned from winter in Mexico, preceding those potential mates and prospecting for an attractive territory.  Here’s what “Micrathene” means—“small” from the Greek “mikros,” and Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom.  Here’s what “awesome” originally and formally meant—inspiring reverence, admiration, or fear.  We stand in awe before this amazing creature.  In darkness.  In silence.  In reverence.  Unaware we are holding our breath.

The spell is broken by a loud commotion, above us up on the pavement.  At first it sounds like nothing so much as horses galloping down the road.  We whirl, gobsmacked, peering through the brush across the creek.  We discern human figures, perhaps six or more, with laden backpacks, running down the hill at full speed, heavy, muffled bootsteps shattering the stillness, then receding into the darkness even before we can begin to breathe again.  Adrenaline surging, eyes wide, we hug one another.

We turn again to the sycamore.  The owl has left, departed on his nightly business of survival, seeking sustenance in the desert’s nocturnal insects.  Migration takes many forms.  Survival has only one meaning.  Migration is the life of many species, survival its ultimate reason.

Elf Owl with centipede
Elf Owl with centipede