The Understudy Owl
Strix paene
Natural history
The Understudy Owl possesses the finest vocal apparatus of any bird yet studied. Its syrinx can reproduce the dawn song of the wood thrush, the full argument of a jay, the exact creak of the particular gate the local crows have been imitating ironically for years. Sonograms of its renditions overlay the originals so precisely that researchers checking their instruments for error have been reduced, on occasion, to simply asking the bird to stop.
It performs none of this at dawn. The dawn chorus is, to the Understudy Owl, the other birds’ engagement, and it would be presumptuous to intrude. Instead it rehearses at night, quietly, alone, running the thrush’s part and the wren’s part and the blackbird’s part in the dark, note-perfect, for no one. Ornithologists estimate that a mature Understudy Owl carries between two and three hundred complete songs, none of which anyone has ever requested.
The species does possess its own call. It has been documented exactly four times, always at great distance, always cut short. Those who have heard it describe it as unlike anything else in the forest, and are then unable to say more. The owl, if approached on the subject, will offer instead a flawless nightingale, which is, it seems to feel, what was probably wanted.
A fable
There was an Understudy Owl who knew three hundred songs, and the forest knew none of hers. Each night she rehearsed: the thrush for when the thrush fell ill, the lark for when the lark moved on, the whole chorus held in reserve against disasters that did not come. The thrush remained healthy. The lark stayed. The owl remained ready, which is a kind of waiting that can fill a life to the brim without ever once being the thing the life was for.
One night a storm took the forest’s edge, and in the morning the thrush’s tree was down and the thrush was gone, and the dawn had a hole in it where the opening song should have been. The owl felt the hole like a doorway. This was the disaster. She was prepared.
She flew to the fallen tree’s neighbor, opened her throat, and gave them the thrush — perfectly. Every note where the thrush would have put it. And the forest woke, and mourned, because the song was exactly right and the singer was exactly wrong, and there is no lonelier music than a voice doing flawlessly what only some other voice could mean.
“Sing something else,” called the wren, gently, from below. “Whose?” said the owl, and ran through her catalogue — three hundred songs, and not one hers, and the doorway still standing open. And because it was dawn, and someone had to, she sang the fourth documented instance of the call of Strix paene, complete this time, and it was unlike anything else in the forest, and the forest went quiet to hear where it would go.
No one is coming to request the song that only you know.
The moral of it