Pueo

We were walking down on corridor Long, having left the corridor in the pasture and gotten into the forest points. The forest points are always the most difficult since you no longer have the obvious gulch or planted corridor to follow when in doubt. And the forest is wonderfully messy with sprawling logs, dense patches of ohelo bushes laden with red berries asking to be picked. The GPS often jumps around, unsure of itself under the tall canopy. So our paths to the two forest points meander. Annie was leading and she took a turn down into a little nook where she flushed a Pueo out from underfoot. The silent bird spread its striped wings and glided across an open patch in the forest.

"Pueo!" I whispered loudly, frantically trying to unhook my binocular strap from where it was hooked on my backpack buckle. I got the optics up to my eyes and studied the perfection in the Pueo's movement.

"What was that?" Annie asked.

"Pueo, the Hawaiian Short-eared Owl," I clarified.

"It was so silent!" she observed.

I agreed, "and think about how terribly loud those Erckel's Francolins and Turkeys are when they take wing. This guy was completely silent." I was still awed by our sighting. How were owls ever omens of bad luck? Maybe people find their noiseless mystery unnerving. But to me, owls are always a mesmerizing blessing.

I paused to write our sighting down on my point count notebook, then we continued hacking out way through the dense underbrush and wading through the waist-high seed-infested golden grass. We left a wake in the meadow and Pueo watched our labored progress from the darkness of an afternoon shadow.