Ooodee The Barn Owl - A True Story

I want to share with you a true story. This is the story of Ooodee the Owl.

In 1985 my daughters and I lived in a town called Mariposa, California, just south of Yosemite National Park. In 1983 we'd moved onto 13 acres of raw Sierra Nevada land, without running water or electricity. For the first three years we lived in a Columbia, a 30-foot travel trailer built in the late 70's. My girls were stacked into the hallway on bunks I had made out of two by fours.

Electricity came two years after our move there and water six years later. Yes, in the middle of America, we lived a dichotomy - a paradoxical life - if you will.

A friend ran into some people in the central valley who uncovered a barn owl's nest in their attic, replete with baby owls; unfortunately the mother never came back. We obtained one of these small birds.

When I first saw Ooodee - his head balding from the loss of his down, he reminded me of a half-blown dragon looking dandelion. His temporary home was a box on our small kitchen table and every time you walked by he would lie back on his elbows, claws out and hiss at you like a dragon.

We fed him raw meat but learned quickly that he needed huge doses of calcium or the complete carcass of a mouse or a bird. An owl, being a predator, and like all birds (and snakes), swallows its food whole. A few days after having eaten the carcass and after full digestion he would regurgitate up a round ball. All of the things not consumable by the bird are there, talons, beaks, claws, and bits of fur or feathers, whatever. It's just under the size of a golf ball and actually very clean and somewhat dry.

This is the way the owl gets its calcium, without which would cause its wings to break when snatching and flying away with prey.

As Ooodee grew he became a loving member of the family. He would flutter inside our little trailer and live at the bottom of the wood stove in a cubby hole. This little place never got too hot or cold and served as his home, much like a hole in a tree. When it came time for him to fly, he would fly to and fro within the trailer. Because of his acute hearing and radar like capabilities, he always managed to keep within a foot of the ceiling.

I remember thinking that as I watched Ooodee perched on my daughter's finger that he was a glorious animal indeed. Each ear was placed off-angle to the other and white downy-soft feathers formed a dish around his face, acting like a receiver for the sound. As I looked at him I realized why Native Americans wore headdresses.

I remember the first time we took him outdoors, realizing that we needed to train him for flying outside and for eventual release. He flew at our height level and landed in some manzanita bushes crying shisssssst shisssst (which is a noise they make). He cried for our help in removing him. He got stuck on all the sticky manzanita berries.

At first, I never realized why he only flew at about 5 feet off the ground, he was a bird - he knows how to fly or so I thought. Then I realized. Ooodee was like us. Like us he lived in a box. That box had a ceiling that was no higher than six feet at the most.

Like us he became conditioned by his experience. He began to believe that when he flew, there was a ceiling overhead and like us, he became a limited being. He hadn't used his natural gift, radar; he continued to believe there was a ceiling.

But the day he discovered the un-limitlessness overhead, I'll remember the rest of my life. His cries of utter joy rang through my being with an ache as he circled higher and higher and higher. He just kept circling and circling up until he finally disappeared from view.

I don't know how high he flew; I only heard the joy in his cry as he got further and further away. I don't know where Ooodee is now, but I've heard stories of him from time to time and I can't help but think how much like us he really is.

We too are raised in boxes of our own making. Our core belief structures formed in childhood from whatever traumas and circumstances we experienced served us then but serve us no longer.

Are you one of those people who only fly five feet off the ground because you're sure the ceiling is still there?

Do something about your limitations. Master them or be mastered by them.

Wishing them away won't work.