I expected to find him dead in the nest box, but he was still alive. I tried to get him out of the box but he turned away to a corner to let me know he just wanted to be left as he was. The sun was behind the mountains. I had to think what to do. I left Prophecy Bird in his nest box and went to feed and water the other macaws in their aviaries.
I saw Bolee, the military macaw hen, at the back of the cage on the floor. That was unusual for her to be standing on the floor, but when I looked more closely I was horrified to see that Bolee was dead but not lying down. She had spread wide her lovely wings a last time for balance because both her legs were gone; she held the cage wire in her beak to steady herself as she died. It took me awhile to loosen her beak from the wire so I could bury her.
I think Bolee fought to her death to keep the owls away from her three offspring in the octagon aviary next to hers. All my attention was on her so I didn’t notice Sandino had lost a leg.
I was in shock. I had to take care of Prophecy Bird, but I already had a sad feeling that he was dying. I went and got a ladder and a towel to wrap around him to catch him. I saw he was in the corner of the barrel, his back to me, and when I made an attempt to put the towel around him to pick him up he turned back twice as if to beg me please to let him be, to let him go in peace.
Sandino seemed o.k. Healthy parrots perch on one leg — in the twilight I couldn’t see his injury. I set up a light near the octagon aviary to discourage owls that night. I had a feeling Prophecy Bird would die that night.
The next morning I found poor Prophecy Bird dead in his oak box and buried him. I loved him dearly and even now I miss him. As I walked back from the grave, I took a look at Sandino in the aviary and it was then I finally saw the jagged ends of the leg bone, and realized he had lost a leg in the owl attack.
Sandino had pretended to be o.k. and had fooled me as he hoped to fool predators. I don’t know why Sandino didn’t die of shock as Bolee and Prophecy Bird had. I felt so badly I had overlooked the terrible injury; but maybe it was good that Sandino had the night to stabilize before he faced the vet office and the surgery.
The orthopedic vet who amputated the remains of the leg was experienced with large birds. He’d seen similar injuries in the Harris hawks and red-tail hawks the State Fish and Game officers brought for treatment. Great horned owls tore the wings off red-tail hawks and falcons, and sometimes their feet.
Twenty-four hours later I brought Sandino home to a different life. I put a macaw cage in my bedroom because it was the warmest room in the house; I wanted Sandino nearby so he knew how much I loved him — I was determined that he survive.
I called my son Caz, who helped me fortify the octagon aviary with hardware cloth and layers of shade cloth to further protect the three young macaws in case the owls returned. I hooked up a light and left on a radio tuned to a talk show station to discourage the owls at night.
For eighteen years I had kept macaws in aviaries outside without any trouble. The great horned owls often came around my house at night, and I loved to hear their HOOO! HOOO! Sometimes I found an owl feather at the water dish near the aviaries, but they never bothered the macaws. Not long before the attack, I’d seen a large handsome horned owl on the top of the utility pole near the big arroyo. There were so many rodents at night for the owls to eat, I didn’t worry, I never dreamed the owls would choose the macaws instead. But in those eighteen years a great deal had changed as the city sprawled across the desert.
That the owls attacked not one but two aviaries in the same night seemed excessive until I thought about it. I recalled the strange uncomfortable energy in the atmosphere here in the hills in the days after I had found the new damage in the arroyo and made the phone calls to the local authorities.
The big arroyo itself is an ecosystem. The animals and humans use the arroyo as a way to traverse the steep rough terrain of the cerros and basalt ridges. Large arroyos may cross private property but the wildlife and pedestrians and equestrians have a right of way to pass through the arroyo; no fences or dams or other obstructions are permitted. Because runoff water concentrates in the arroyo, the wildlife of the desert gravitate there to feed or hunt. The excavating machine not only tore up the boulders, it disrupted the entire area, and left many creatures homeless as well as hungry and thirsty.
The suffering and distress of so many living beings from the same location of the desert created an anxious angry energy of conflict that permeated the area. I felt it strongly; the disturbance was real and pervasive, even on a psychic level. The fury of the owls was powerful, but the man with the machine was full of fury as well.
January is the month the birds and animals give birth and raise their young ahead of the brutal summer heat. The pair of owls killed my macaws to feed their owlets. If the owls had been able to find game elsewhere they would have done so, but the big construction boom with cheap mortgage money had brought the bulldozers to the desert hills to crush and scrape the earth for grotesque mansions where the owls once hunted.
The machines dug up the earth and destroyed the nests of rodents and birds in the owls’ habitat, and disrupted hunting and water sources. The bulldozers sent the hungry owls to find food for their nestlings in my aviaries. I love the great horned owls; I don’t blame the owls for the attack on my macaws, I blame the men in the bulldozers who crush the desert. I blame the imbeciles in Pima County government who fail at everything except collecting taxes and bribes.
The strange angry energy loose in the Tucson Mountains in early January was also fed by the machine man’s anger at the visits from the county authorities. He tolerated no interference from any government; he was a law unto himself.
Six or seven days after the owl attack, Bill and I were awakened one night by a loud sound that shook the bedroom. It felt and sounded as if some large object had hit the wall outside the east-facing window. Whatever it was struck the wall about seven feet above the ground.
Bill went back to sleep, and it was then I realized something strange was going on — not of this world because the four mastiffs outside the bedroom door had slept through the loud thud of the object that hit the side of the house. The dogs’ self-preservation instincts kept them safely asleep as the wild violent force raged outside the house.
I got up and in the bathroom I was able to hear a sound from outside the east-facing wall but as if no interior walls or exterior wall existed. It seemed like the low guttural canine sound of a growl just before it turned into a howl. The word “werewolf” at once came to mind.
The odd energy came in a straight line from the site of destruction in the big arroyo east of my house.
The four dogs remained asleep. I went back to bed. I wasn’t afraid because all nine of the Star Being portraits were facing the east that night, and protected the house from the “werewolf energy” sent my way by the machine man.
After the owl attack I was too sick over the loss of Prophecy Bird and Bolee, and too anxious about Sandino’s survival, to think about writing. I had to give Sandino antibiotics twice a day so I stopped my walk so I’d be there at the right times. I wasn’t able to write or paint or do anything but check on the remaining macaws and watch television, which served as a kind of narcotic.
The owls attacked the macaws on January 11 but I wasn’t able to bring myself to write about it for months. When my beloved grandpa Hank died, it took more than ten years before I was able to write about the morning he passed away, in the poem titled “Deer Dance/For Your Return.”