We look for birds.
The boys and I are driving home. One son is good at spotting raptors. He finds them with a shrug, half bored already. His brother and I lean forward, arching over the dashboard to see what he’s already found. We are a traffic hazard.
I came from a warmer place where winter is more subtle than it is in Colorado. In California, winter begins as wind flailing through the thin, lithe branches of tall eucalyptus trees, bending them back and forth — they are willing dancers, built for the give and sway; the flail is graceful, steady, you can get slowly acclimated to the newness and shift.
Here, winter drops down all at once. I turn toward it, reluctantly but in good graces, by the end of August, and each November I think I’m ready. Then, while I’m sleeping or unawares, the upper prairie, seemingly overnight, becomes a shaken Etch A Sketch and everything as far as I can see fades out to a blank screen. Sweeps of land, in a blink, erase themselves to almost absent shades of gray, brown, tan. Even the red foxes, heads held quite near arrogance, and high all autumn long, seem suddenly gone; their flashes of bright tail and nugget-small black noses disappear from the fence lines.
I’ve been in Colorado more than 20 years, but still, each winter, the barren weighs on me.
Except this year; we’ve spent these last cold months scanning the high trees for owls, hawks and falcons. We see the hawks and the falcons again and again, sometimes around every turn, sitting sentinel, like small, flighted lions in the tops of leafless trees. They stick out like dark raisins in a box of wooden toothpicks: You can’t help but see them.
Only the owls elude us. Surely there, they mime trees by day, adept at camouflage, invisible. They lean into thick limbs and trunks, shelter themselves and wait until dark for cover.
Because the sky has been slashed with stick-figured trees all winter, we’ve had months to try to spot an owl. The other raptors, more brazen, seem to pose for us, like brown, mottled flags high in the trees. Spotting them has been effortless; we look and there they are, large against the limbs and dark against the white sky. Their physical presence is obvious, plumb, watchful.
Now, for the first time, I feel trepidation whisk past me each time I drive under the twiggy cottonwoods, the elms, the honey locusts. They will soon bud into canopies of green, thick, impenetrable leaves. I won’t be able to see the birds.
“But they’ll still be there,” says my oldest son.
Yes. I know this in my head, but it feels like a loss. I try to picture them perched on limbs between green- white-green-white flipping leaves as the wind moves past them.
Last night we drove home, near dark, the sky falling fast toward a color I can’t yet describe: owl time. We leaned and swiveled and I pulled the car over once; we got out, stood stalk still, but no. We didn’t spot even one.
In the meantime, because it is spring, the vultures have returned from the warmer states. They soar, near dusk, over Mountain Avenue. One night we saw near a hundred. Because it’s spring, the female osprey is settled down low on her eggs, only her eyes peeking over the nest wall, and the red-tail hawks — paired — dance together in swoops.
Life grows incrementally and in proportion to each small loss. Because it’s spring, the trees will fill in and block much of what was clear all winter. My friend calls and says she thinks she has great horned owls in her tree. She says she hears them at night, thinks there’s a nest filling with their small bodies, their open mouths, their eyes soon the size of pennies.
The next day we go, and we wait. The sky turns to near dark and she says “shhhh.” We wait and wait and because owls are as silent as anything you will ever know, they simply appear where they were — only moments before — not. They balance, perched, tiny and fully feathered: not great horns at all, but screech owls. Two. Because it is spring, we see them this time.
E-mail Fort Collins poet and writer Natalie Costanza-Chavez at grace-notes@comcast.net. Read more of her essays at .
