The Great Horned Owl

Couldn't get to sleep last night, and right before I set the phone down around 12:30 a.m., an email from Grego came through, wanting to know what kind of owl flies into the shed where the zombie is--Great Horned or Snowy Owl? 

Aha! I thought, this is why I couldn't fall asleep. I needed to be up for his email, to offer the one thing he needed to finish the next page. Hubris/magical thinking/striving to make sense of things...

I immediately typed out "Great Horned" then before sending decided to google "owls on the Palouse" then saw that Grego sent a followup email with a pdf pamphlet on "The Prairie Owl" from the Palouse Audubon Society. And I was glad to have affirmed that the Great Horned Owl is: "Probably the most well known and most seen species" on the Palouse. 

Besides captive owls, it's the only owl I've encountered--of a dark night, startled by one overhead in the front yard crabapple tree; on another night, by one in a nearby evergreen. Once, in the old arboretum on campus I had a conversation with a Great Horned in the dark. 

So I sent the email into the ether and turned out the light.

Here's the Audubon image:

And later in the morning after a couple hours of sleep, I was happy to see Grego's version: