This is bird note.

Some birds are rare. Some birds are shy. Some birds dwell in remote, utterly inaccessible

forests and swamps and deserts. Not the long-eared owl, though it's hard to estimate the populations

of nocturnal birds, there may be as many as five million long-eared owls in the world.

They aren't particularly shy, and in many places they breed and winter right in towns

and cities. And yet, even by owl standards, the long-eared owl is a rarely seen bird.

Even if you're constantly on the lookout for this handsome, mid-sized owl, it's a red

letter day when you actually get to see one. It's not a question of rarity, shyness, or inaccessibility.

It's a combination of plumage and habits that makes the long-eared such a fine.

The mixture of warm browns and cool, bark-like grays, lends the bird in astonishingly branch-like

appearance. When people or other potential predators approach, long-eareds further enhance

their invisibility by closing their orange eyes and stretching their bodies as close to

the vertical as possible. Even to an extremely practiced human eye, they become nothing more

than a jagged stump in the roost tree.

Sometimes, just knowing they're out there, somewhere, has to be enough.

For Bird Note, I'm Mary McCann.