Listen to the Female Great Horned Owl Call Here
No matter that it was her third year of recording in the dark, crouching below oak and pecan trees lifting her shotgun microphone higher; every time Talia heard the telltale hooting of the male Great Horned Owl and the answering screech of the female, sometimes closer, sometimes further away, her skin prickled. Adjusting her headphones only brought the ambient noises of the night closer to her conscious mind, like the world was pressing close around her, breathing against her skin.
Talia swept her dark curtain of bangs out of her eyes and adjusted the huge, padded headphones on her ears. They rubbed against the other side of her head whose shaved fuzz was slowly growing back over the winding black vine tattoo snaking up her neck and behind her ear. She’d been kneeling in the scrub brush for over an hour. The cold creeped into the joints of her hands, her knees, her ankles. She wasn’t as young as she used to be when she first started this work, but there was still something thrilling about preserving the haunting call and response of the owls to listen back to and share with the ornithologists she worked with, as well as uploading to the conservation database that was shared with local university biology students all the way to elementary kids.
The Avian Research and Conservation Institute had her out doing field work near a central Texas wildlife preserve that was surrounded by new housing developments encroaching into the hills. Construction noises and children playing sometimes polluted the recordings, but once deeper into the trees, Talia could hear more clearly the hooting in the waning light. She’d been out there almost every night for three weeks, patiently cataloguing the calls for the small population of owls nesting in that preserve. More than one owl had died swooping in front of cars from the highway or were displaced from their roosting spots because of the construction. It was nice to hear the calls of those who remained.
Tonight, Talia had recorded a few good calls, including the screech of a female roosting nearby and the duets of a male and female, one pitching high and the other answering in a lower hoot, the call and response moving from tree to tree, sometimes closer and sometimes further away from her in the darkness. In the twilight, Talia saw the black outlines of two owls sitting patiently on the same tree, one on the upper branch, the other below, calling into the night. She hoped she would hear a female call that was almost always shriller and more piercing than the others. The last three nights she’d been sitting out here in the damp brush after a chill November rain. This particular call came without warning. It wasn’t responding to a male’s hooting in the dark but seemed to come through her headphones like a lost call all on its own. In fact, Talia noticed that every time she heard this female, the male calls in the vicinity fell silent.
The high-pitched series of hoots finally came far off to her left, and Talia walked in an awkward crouch around the bases of trees to get a little closer to this noise. One colleague used to say that when you heard the right bird call through the headphones, it shimmered. Talia hoped to capture some of that magic tonight.
Talia’s grandmother used to tell her and her brothers the stories of the Lechuza, the owl witch woman who would carry off kids who misbehaved, not listening to their elders. At her house in McAllen that ran up against a creek, Grandma would tuck Talia into the twin bed with her younger brother Jorge. When they heard the tell-tale call of what Talia now knew was a barred owl calling from the tree outside their window in that all too familiar who cooks for you, who cooks for us all, Grandma would pull the covers up to their chins, reminding them “go to sleep, the Lechuza snatches little kids who don’t go to bed on time.” To hear her Abuela tell it, if someone was bad enough, the Lechuza could take their very soul.
Her abuela knew a man who wandered around after getting drunk at the bar. He had wandering eyes, wandering hands, and would come home drunk, swaying and screaming at his wife and his children. Sometimes he did more than scream. Walking back to his house one night, he heard the owl calling him and, in a fit of drunken rage, began throwing rocks into the trees, searching for the owl whose call tormented him. When his eyes finally met the Lechuza’s, she swooped down and snatched his eyes right out of his head. From then on, he never drank another drop and his only wandering around town was to tell anyone who would listen about the witch owl who took his eyes.
Jorge would cuddle into Talia’s side and hide his head under the covers once their Grandma went to bed, cocooning into the safe warmth of her armpit. But Talia would look out the window, listened for the haunting call of the owl and the iridescent glow of its eyes.
Now, when Talia sought out the owls, she thought of the Lechuza stories as warnings from her grandmother about what a woman turned monster could become. She asked her Grandma once where the Lechuza came from, and was she a witch or an owl.
“She is both, and neither. Lechuzas are what happens when a woman turns from God, from her duties as wife and mother, to a different life of evil and darkness.”
Later, Talia read a recorded legend from Mexico that the Lechuza was a woman who shapeshifted into an owl and became a vengeful spirit taking revenge on those who wronged her in life. Her grandmother’s emphasis on what a “good woman” was made her wonder if she ever wished she could sprout feathers and fly away from her cruel husband who ignored her and insulted her by turn.
This was same woman who told Talia when she turned twenty-one never to buy sex toys because they would ruin her for her future husband. Talia never found the heart or the courage to tell her she had a girlfriend who had lovingly accompanied her to the sex shop to purchase her very first strap-on. When she thought about it later, Talia felt sorry for her abuela, but she never forgot her stories, if only because they came unbidden to her when she sat listening in the dark.
Call me closer.
There was the call of the lone female owl again come from one of the trees to her left. After a few minutes of silence in which other owl responded, Talia tried to mimic the lower, throatier hooting of the male owls. She stared into the night, willing her human eyes to let in the darkness the way they let in the light. That haunting call came in response and Talia held her mic higher to get a quality recording. She mimicked the male call again, smiling wide when this lone female call came closer than before. They went back and forth like that for a few minutes, call and response, though Talia knew she was compromising the recording with her own voice.
A shadow darker than the night around her swooped over Talia’s head, making two arching circles. It was closer to the size of a sandhill crane than an owl. The creature landed silently in front of Talia. It appeared as an owl with piercing yellow eyes until it wrapped its wings around its body and began to grow. It spread and shifted its tawny wings, revealing the full expanse of a body that matched the brown of her feathers that ran along her outstretched wings. When she lifted her head, the Lechuza stared right into Talia’s eyes with her yellow ones, shifting her wide hips and full thighs from side to side as if testing their weight on the soft, damp leaf covered ground, though her feet were not human toes but huge tufted talons. Brown, yellow and orange feathers covered her wings, chest and the back of her head ending in the two horned tufts on either side that Talia ached to touch. Her face was rounded with dark furrowed brows that connected in a V on her forehead and her lips were black as an owl’s beak.
The Lechuza hopped and stepped across the ground towards Talia, who dropped her recording equipment on the ground and let her headphones dangle around her neck. The creature came within a foot of Talia, quirking its head from side to side and studying her features.
Talia realized that the creature was backing her into a black walnut tree when her back hit bark. She felt pressure building between her thighs, a slickness that made her already damp black jeans rub together. She wondered if the Lechuza could smell her, was mapping out her body with its eyes. When she approached close enough for Talia to feel her hot breath on her face, the creature croaked, “why did you call me?”
“I, I, I- didn’t know I was calling you.”
The Lechuza quirked her head again, pressing against Talia’s body, covering her with her wings in a tight, warm embrace. Talia’s eyes closed and she thrust her neck up towards the lips of the creature, a foolhardy thing to do to a famed predator, but the Lechuza sniffed and nuzzled her there and along her chest. Talia felt both aroused and protected, but she kept her eyes squeezed shut as her Abuela’s voice flickered in her ear to protect her eyes, and her precious soul.
“You smell…” the Lechuza croaked, nibbling gently behind Talia’s ear. She didn’t finish the thought, and Talia found she didn’t care, lost in the sensation of being appraised by the creature.
“Do you want to go with me?” the Lechuza rasped. “Do you want to be mine?”
With eyes still pressed tight, Talia stammered a “yes,” into the cocoon of air between them.
The Lechuza ran her right wing down Talia’s back like she was unzipping her. In the wake of this touch, Talia felt her nerve endings burst with a fiery, prickling sensation where feathers sprouted across the surface of her skin like she was a bag being turned inside out. The pleasure pain swept through her body, making Talia scream. The Lechuza kept her cocooned, watching the transformation intently. Talia’s arms flapped out around her and her back and arms were now covered in feathers as dark as her hair. Blood burst from her mouth where her teeth pushed themselves out by the roots and hair fell from her head in soft clumps. Talia’s features smoothed, extending, forming her mouth to a sharp brown point though she continued to croak and cry. Her tennis shoes burst at the toes where bright brown talons now steadied her, and Talia tested their weight, screeching into the night in her new owl voice.
The Lechuza, her new mate, hopped back on her talons and studied this new owl woman whose name didn’t really matter anymore. She spread her wings up and wide, crouched so her new mate would know how to take flight. Their wing beats were slow, measured movements that gusted wind around them in soundless waves. Finally, they took flight and give chase into the wild darkness.
The director of the Avian Research and Conservation Institute found the abandoned recording equipment Talia had checked out days later in the preserve cushioned by a tuft of soft downy feathers. Playing back the recordings, she heard a long duet between two female owls, call and response, fading in and out of range before taking flight to parts unknown.
About the Author
Leticia Urieta (she/her/hers) is a Tejana writer from Austin, TX. She is a teaching artist in the greater Austin community and the Program Director of Austin Bat Cave, a literary community serving students in the Austin area. Leticia is also a freelance writer. She is a graduate of Agnes Scott College and holds an MFA in Fiction writing from Texas State University. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Chicon Street Poets, Lumina, The Offing, Kweli Journal, Medium, Electric Lit and others. Her chapbook, The Monster was published in 2018 from LibroMobile Press. Her hybrid collection, Las Criaturas, was a finalist for the Sergio Troncoso Award for Best First Book of Fiction 2022 from the Texas Institute of Letters, and is out now from FlowerSong Press.
About the Artist
Sammy is an artist and writer in Chicago, IL. Born and raised in Troy, MI, she does freelance work as a creative and is reachable via email sammloree@gmail.com. Updates on her work and commission openings can be found on her Instagram @samloreeart.
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