In the small German village where I grew up villager solidarity increased proportionally to the amount of nightly noise produced by a band of roaming peacocks. A miniature version of this is happening in my current neighborhood where the neighborly greetings of each other start with the question, “did they keep you up all night as well?” A pair of very loud and very much in love owls is filling the air from sun down to sun rise.

The fact that this experience is possible 10 minutes from downtown Portland – well, make that 25 now with the traffic – makes me happy. Add owls to the larger  species of birds we now regularly see within the urban environment, bald eagles, hawks, peregrine falcons, ospreys, cormorants, herons, to name some of them. Geese, how could I forget geese?

The photomontage above used a photograph of an osprey taken on SE Division, close to the railroad tracks. The red-tail hawk who is taking off in the background was photographed on Sauvies Island.