Owl Calls from Around the World

Last night was the Perseid peak. As the weather was fine, I resolved not to miss them yet another time. I drove up to a wildlife preserve in Lyons and ended up seeing some meteors, a black bear sitting in the road after I came down a long grade, and then some kind of owl, which shrieked at us for a good 20 minutes and had me feeling a little jibblie, especially before I knew what it was. The little shrieking bursts started several hundred feet away, and started moving towards us. I got nervous, what is it? The only animal I know that shrieks like a person is of the larger cat variety, and not something I was particularly keen on meeting in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere. Suddenly I saw this lump on the road, and I'm thinking, "Oh my god, what is it, there is no way that's a bird because bird's FLY!" Then after displaying its wings at us and giving another fierce shriek, it flew up and over our heads.

This is not the best year for meteors as we are approaching a full moon and there is a lot of extra light in the sky making it difficult to see the small particles; but it was still way more shooters than in an ordinary night of stargazing.

The Perseids was something I started doing in high school with a very dear friend who is now long disappeared from my life. (Clearly a bride of Christ in a past life, she because the bride of a much more mundane, and much less mystical, minister in this one.) Back then (I'm an old timer now) it was enough to pull off 36 between Boulder & Lyons. There's a lot more light pollution this low, now. And I sorely miss having a truck and just climbing in the back with a blanket and staring at the sky.

I'm still trying to figure out what kind of bird it was, triangulating the owls known to be in this area, with birdcalls online. I thought some of you might find this site amusing:

Owl Calls from Around the World