The Call in the Darkness and a GHOst in waiting

 October 27th 2014

Saturday night on the farm, with no electricity for miles and I am on the terrace - wouldn't miss this for the World. 

After the rains of a lifetime (60 mm in four hours), there is darkness all around - a pitched, sombre, heavy, cloudy darkness, with the mist lending a ghostly air to the evening.  You'd expect silence to add to the eerieness, but far from it, the frogs - a thousand of them, I'd imagine - are in full song, in harmony and out of it, their rasping, harsh, monotonous, unending voices reminding me of a long forgotten classmate, who, I'd once prophesied, would ascend the evolution order to reach their status some day.

And, as I sit there breathing it all in, I hear the bu....boo call from the trees yonder.  A prolonged call, silence, and then the call again.  An owl for sure, and should the spectre make its appearance, I would get quite a start.  For the Great Horned Owl is a stern chap, unsmiling and focused, his (or her) yellow eyes boring into you with an unblinking gaze.  But, he doesn't make a visit, for there is a buffet on call, quite literally!  I hear his hoot - that distinctive bu...boo, as if from a hurriedly made flute, a few times and, then, he is gone - in that silent, leisurely way of his, to pick on the frog menu, or perhaps a mouse that had lost its way.

But what an unforgettable call!  Even the gremlins who chose Latin prefixes for birds were impressed, for his European cousin is called Bubo Bubo in an unspoken tribute. He - the Great Horned Owl - is the Bubo Bengalensis.