Scary Creatures

I've lived in the country for thirty four years but have to admit getting a little spooked the other night. Strange sounds and creatures clawing on the house. Owls are frequent guests and we had two the other night, couldn't determine exactly where because of the pitch blackness, but they were somewhere on the eave, scratching around quite aggressively. Owls don't bother me although it is a bit disconcerting when they slaughter their prey above our bedroom window. But there was something else out there, never could make out exactly what it was.

When you live on the river for a long time, you get used to the night noises, they become very familiar. That does not mean that occasionally you do not see very unusual things. A friend saw a big buck last week,  never see them anymore. Lev and Beth saw a mountain lion on the river few weeks back.

Leslie and I both saw a very rare sight in a fox at different times last weekend. I saw a scraggly old bighorn ram at the bottom of my driveway way back in 1983. Never know what you'll see. Once had three thousand or so Canadian geese camping out in the river across from my spread, back in '93. Loud bunch, they must not have liked the accommodations, never came back.

Anyway it wasn't the owls or the red tailed raptors the other night, it was something else, a honking, plaintiff bird call that resembled a goose in a lot of pain. It sounded most like the guttural call of the blue heron that lives below us, but he is usually a quiet sort and keeps to himself. Maybe I was mistaking pain for some other ecstatic heron emotion and he had found himself a girl but it went on for over an hour, near midnight, and neither one of us could figure it out and it sounded painful. Wonder what the hell it was?

I took pictures of the owl above, one lucky full moon night some time back.

Feels like fall around here, all of a sudden. Rainy, windy and cold today. Chris's restaurant should finally open tomorrow, county been screwing him around for ages. Fallbrook Pharmacy is no more. CVS is definitely not the same, no more small town pharmacy, girls look a little miserable.