The Owls Have Gone For Spring
The Consistency of Change
This is always what spring brings—a moment when things burst to life only to return to a quiet cold or rainy day, bringing us back begrudgingly into a sense that we still haven't quite left winter. That teasing is as much a part of spring as the flowers and the sound of new songbirds in forests. The sun keeps me excited but the return to cold days like this makes me even more hopeful for spring.
Still, with or without the rain, I need to be outside. As I run around the Hugo Chavez Park, I’ve been stopping for a moment each run to see if I can spot the burrowing owls that live there. A friend showed me them a few months ago and since then, I’ve gone to see them at least once a week.
But, lately as the weather has begun to heat up, they seem to have left. I couldn't spot them anywhere. And today, on my last run, again, they were nowhere to be seen.
Burrowing owls are often migratory birds, with the East Bay the last little enclave at the southern end of their year-round range. Here, in Berkeley, they don’t stay, but would rather fly south, maybe to the prairies of the Carizzo plains, I imagine, to admire the wildflowers, or further still to some little deserts near the San Gabriels to feel the arid heat of Southern California or Mexico. They don’t stay here, for me or other urban bird nerds to admire. They leave, flying south to join in the journeys that bring about new life. The whole deal of spring, they are a part of it just as much as the flowers.
But it’s sad to see them go, flying all the way south, further away. I complain to myself that I have to stay here, that I have to work so much, that I, in order to feel sane, have to run, that I don’t have much time to take in the flowers this spring. That I, by choice or not, must stay inside more than I ever really would wish.
The burrowing owls, for the past few months, have been a bit of a balm. I go to see them, on a run or not, just to get away from the house, from my phone, from the news. I look for them, walking slowly, admiring them with so many others, because they are there, in their little haven beside the water, safe from us onlookers, ignorant of our human world just as much as we are ignorant of theirs. Coming to stare at them I always wonder if they ever hunt the ground squirrels that surround them. Do they have small neighborly disputes? Are their eyes also peeled in the day for red-tailed hawks? For great-horned owls in the evening?
Wondering about them, their little lives which no doubt are richer than I can imagine, was a way to mark my days and weeks, to neglect just for a second DOGE, the enshitification of the government, and what that might mean for my life and finding better, more stable, income in my future.
So much has changed for me since this past spring, but ever since the summer ended and my friend showed me them, the burrowing owls have been consistent, a steady presence in my life in a time when everything has seemed to shift into new journeys without much warning, leaving no time for my own reflection. The world, along with my own little life here in the Bay, has been in a constant state of whiplash. And the burrowing owls have been there, a little critter that, despite the changes in the world, despite news, despite the people that stopped to ogle them, like myself, the burrowing owls were here, content to stand on top of their rocks, surrounded by the California ground squirrels that lazed about the wet grasses.
But they have finally left, as many things here do in the middle of spring. It is what so many things do and what makes spring a joy to some, and a horror to others. It’s full of so much change. The winds shift along with the rain patterns, the temperature. The color of the ground lightens as specks of color grow from green fields. The quickening quiet of night is superseded by long drawn out clouds and shadows, marking across the fields and homes where we live. It’s the change that we love, or the change that we hate, about spring.
That sounds like a platitude, and it is. But I also think of it as the thing that is most consistently true, the thing that comforts me in the midst of all this chaos. As the days of the human world grow darker, it seems important to cling to this, this one small thing as a reminder that yes, I live in a world that is a world. I don’t just live in a world of stories, or terrors of narratives, but I live in a world that can have a months-long period devoted to flowers, to breeding animals, to growth. That I literally need this world, and because of it I can survive despite long months of winter.
Because, in that other world, the world of ideas and narratives, the world where this essay exists in your head and mine, the changes are harder to see but are no less important. The spring, the seasons’ shifts, they may look different year to year, Millenia to Millenia, but that time when things go from cooler to warmer when the angle of the sun makes days grow longer, it will return. Just as the burrowing owls will return. Just as now in the woods bordering Oakland, I’ve been hearing the sound of black-headed grosbeaks, a sign that while it's cold and is going to rain soon, spring is here.
