Spinning Pins

Found from Minnesota to Quebec and Mississippi, Eastern Screech Owl is a monument to human naming and noticing, marking various groups' languages, dialects, metaphors and observations with its collection of names. According to Allan W. Eckert, The Owls of North America, it is called:

demon owl, dusk owl, ghost owl ("so expertly avoiding collision with intertwined branches that it appears to go through them"), gray owl, Le Petit-Duc de l'Est, Little Dukelet, little-eared owl, little horned owl, little owl, mottled owl, mouse owl ("prey it most favors"), quavering owl, red owl, scops owl, scritch owl, shivering owl (for its call, its effect on the superstitious, and "because young nestling Screech Owls are subject to severe attacks of shivering"), spirit owl, squinch owl, trilling owl, whistling owl.


In one way, these names pin to the creature and become monuments to human times and places, as though a regional culture could fly through the woods and return to a nest.

In another way, the variation itself is a complicated pin that marks the owl's own changeability. It can be a range of colors and shapes (when apprehensive, "the owl can elongate its perched body until it has stretched upward nearly half again its normal perched height"), and its call is really a dialect in itself, full of versions and individuation.

Years pass, but dusk is still "the time of day when it is most often seen"--the very time when a sighting is possible, but difficult.